The Psychology Behind the $500,000 Handbag

This is a very interesting article! So happy I'm free from being "traumatic bonding" that's exactly how it was with my family of origin and then reenacted with my ex for a long 10 years! 

"This emotional rollercoaster of reward and punishment is called “traumatic bonding.” In traumatic bonding, the victim bonds to the abuser because of poor treatment, not despite it. This bond enables the abuser to exert control and influence others. Dutton and Painter (1981) indicated that this only occurs in the context of a key environmental factor—an imbalance of power. If a highly narcissistic abuser lacks the upper hand, intermittent reinforcement loses its grip.

Read more in the link below:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unconscious-branding/202111/the-psychology-behind-the-500000-handbag 

Parents Project their Repressed Feelings into Their Own Children

“Our parents project the repressed feelings of their own childhood onto us and without realizing it blames us for the things that once happened to them. Like the psychiatrist Henry in Brigitte’s story (see Chapter 2), parents often react blindly and destructively because they are still caught up in the reality of their childhood without realizing it. To survive cruelties---beatings, humiliations, and neglect---they had to conceal their own feelings from themselves. Now they have become slaves to those emotions they cannot control them because they cannot understand their meaning, and they cannot understand their meaning because, like Adam and Eve in Paradise, they have been told to regard cruelty as love. They have been taught to obey incomprehensible commandments and have been made to remain in a state of blindness all their lives, threatened with brimstone and hellfire should they dare to dissent” Alice Miller, taken from the book “The truth Will Set you Free” page 96

BARRIERS IN THE MIND

"It is a never-ending source of acute distress for me when I think of the devastating power of denial in producing the barriers in our minds. One of the ways this obstructive power manifests itself is in the persistence of theologians and philosophers in discussing ethical issues without taking any account of the findings produced by brain research and the laws governing infant development. 

These factors are crucial to a clearer understanding of how evil originates and how we actively perpetuate it. For psychoanalysts, it is also high time to rethink the concepts of destructive drives and evil, "perverted" children, which they have inherited from *poisonous pedagogy. But in order to do so they would have to take modern research on infancy seriously. The approach adopted by Daniel Stern and the followers of John Bowlby still appears to gain only peripheral attention in psychoanalytic circles, perhaps because by his theory of initial attachment Bowlby exploded a taboo. By linking the causes of antisocial behavior with the absence of a resilient attachment to the mother, he was flying in the face of Freud's drive theory.

But my conviction is that we have to go a step further than Bowlby went. We are dealing here not just with anti-social behavior and so-called narcissistic disorders but with the inescapable realization that denying and repressing our childhood traumas means reducing our capacity to think and conspiring to erect barriers in our minds. Brain research has succeeded in uncovering the biological foundations of the denial phenomenon. But the consequences, the impact on our mentality, have not yet been adequately contemplated. No one appears to be interested in examining how insensitivity to the suffering of children--a phenomenon found the world over--is bound up with a form of mental paralysis that has its roots in childhood.

As children, we learn to suppress and deny natural feelings and to believe sincerely that the cuffs and blows we receive are for our own good and do us no lasting injury. Our brains, furnished with this false information, then instruct us to raise our own children by the same methods, telling them that it is good for them just as it was good for us.

This way of thinking causes billions of people to believe that children can become good and decent citizens only if we do violence to them. 

They are blind to the fear in their children's eyes and refuse to acknowledge that the only thing we can really instill in children by beating them is the determination to use violence later in life, either against themselves or against others. These destructive beliefs, also held by many intellectuals, are impervious to argument because they are stored in the body at a very early stage. Such people will make blunt assertions that, without their realizing it, stand in the starkest contrast to the pure intellectual knowledge they acquired from books." -- Alice Miller

above excerpt from BARRIERS IN THE MIND
Chapter 7 from The Truth Will Set You Free
by Alice Miller www.nospank.net/miller18.htm

*Alice Miller used a term above "poisonous pedagogy," which you may not be familiar with, so I will enclose a link to a section in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, where she explains in a summary what "poisonous pedagogy" means www.nospank.net/fyog9.htm#summary

from Project NoSpank www.nospank.net/main-x.htm the entire book of For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller www.nospank.net/fyog.htm
Alice Miller Index www.nospank.net/milindex.htm

Alice Miller Index www.nospank.net/milindex.htm

6 Reasons Why Narcissists Try to Appear Caring and Helpful

 Malignant narcissists only care about their image, money, and protecting their name and could care less about you or any other breathing living being... 

6 Reasons Why Narcissists Try to Appear Caring and Helpful

"...Since narcissists are very interested in social status and influence, they use acts of generosity to appear noble and kind. ...Being a good person, or rather appearing as one publicly, can generate fame and boost a narcissist's public image. 

Some examples of this are narcissists who donate their money, goods, or time. A regular person receiving public acknowledgment for their good acts is secondary but for a narcissist, it's the main goal. Participating in a public photoshoot or making an article or announcement in regard to their generous deed go viral is what they are actually interested in." 

Read more in the link below:

https://psychcentral.com/blog/psychology-self/2020/05/narcissists-generosity#1

Money Alone Will not Save Anyone

 MC,

I'm not staying with anyone! I’m staying with myself!  I know I only got crumbs and in the late 80s, I sent them enough money that covers all the crumbs they ever gave me.

The important enlightened information that I took back in a tray and I shared with everyone freely, so they too could help themselves and stop playing their part in the family dysfunction, but they chose not to pay attention to me, because to your mother and most people, unless you have a DR in front of your name or a Ph.D. at the end can possibly have anything of value to say and they rather keep paying attention and listen to charlatans with some stupid certificate/diploma that all they care about is getting money from them. 

This enlightened information -- has more value than all the money in this world put together, even if only a few see the value in it.

ML lies just as much if not more, constantly playing the heroine and the victim role, just like MI, and never takes responsibility for her part in the family dysfunction.

E and L all their lives have been chasing and feeding illusions and the truth is they can spend their money on whatever they want and give it to whoever they want and we don't have to like it!

Yes, it's not fair that MI is getting everything and taking my part also of my parents' property, but I don't care anymore, it is what it is, they can have it all and put it down the drain for all I care...

I make enough for myself and I know I will be okay; I'm just staying here in my little corner happy and free, away from everybody and their endless painful reenactments and dramas.

When you said that your mother and E should have not brought MI and me with them, you might be right, but E and L unconsciously needed dependent little children to use as poison containers to project and transfer all their repressed poison to alleviate their own unresolved childhood repression to temporarily and superficially feel better about themselves. 

At the time, as a little child, I didn't understand these psychological mechanisms and how people always need available beings at their disposal to use for projection and transference effects...

If E and L were healthy, capable of authentic feelings, and able to see clearly and brought us with them to the city to genuinely parent us and prepare us for a better future -- when L met your father -- and she decided to marry him --she and your father, not us, should have temporally rented a place and then put the house in Praca Sousa Caldas for sell and after it sold each take their own money and E buy a new house for us, and L buys a new house for her and her husband. Because the stability and the well-being of the children that they had committed themselves to -- should have come first -- and the needs of two selfish adults that just gotten married should have come second.

The way you talked the other day sounded like, you were not born YET, and you had more rights to the house in Praca Sousa Caldas that at the time was bought with E, L, and some of my parents' money, they got from IP to allow him to build his house in their property, 

The truth is when L met your father and you were born, she didn't need us as much, because your father and after were you born, you both became her number one poison containers or scapegoats at her disposal to project and transfer all her repressed poison -- your mother's desire to give birth to you was to satisfy her unconscious need to endless have a being available at her disposal to use as poison container and now you need to liberate yourself from all the poison she and your FATHER, your father had his own dose of unresolved childhood repression or poison, that also was transferred into you when you were a defenseless infant and little girl, and, if I were you I would let your mother be with whoever she wants and if she gives all her money away, it's her problem...

And, I would only focus on liberating myself from all the poison transferred into me in my childhood and live my best life and refuse to get involved in any of my mother's lies and family dramas, because your mother and them will never change, they all deserve each other... I know it's hard to witness all their craziness and so much money burned...

We have to let them go -- if we want to be free ... It took me more than 40 years to totally liberate myself from all the poison they transferred into me when I was a defenseless little girl and let them all go... free at last!!!

Be careful not to surround yourself with only YES people that agree with you all the time and just tell you what you like to hear and never tell you what you need to hear if you like to grow as a person and not become like your mother and at end of the journey with plenty of money but lost in projections and transferences... money alone doesn't save anyone.

Wish you courage and strength

Freedom ain't free! It comes with a lot of losses. Stop fighting and walk away. Take time to mourn and heal. At the end of mourning, you feel so free and good that you never thought was possible.

Please don't make the fatal mistake of believing you can "control and change" a malignant narcissist by loving them more, by not doing what triggers them off.....they don't want to change because they like what they are. They want to destroy you, feed off you, deplete you and exhaust you! Cut your losses and walk away from malignant narcissists that's the only way to free and save yourself.

What's a scandal?! That's when the real state of affairs behind the scenes breaks through and
is exposed for everyone to see.

If you had the good fortune to be introduced to enlightened information you will be tested in life. I'm sad someone close to me failed the test big time. All because of money. If you are free and healthy you can always make more money! Freedom isn't free!
I see people connected all the time by fear, hatred, and by money, but seldom do I see people connected by love.