Playing the Victim Card can Get you Far

She thinks she is in "control"! She believes she is brighter than those around her because of all the intellectual knowledge she has learned from me, and she has the illusion that gives her an advantage in the games people play. However, she doesn't realize that she is still emotionally blind by the unresolved repressed emotions of the child she once was. She is driven by unresolved, repressed emotions into the state of repetition compulsion, and intellectual knowledge and money alone will not save her or liberate her.

The only way to free herself was to walk away from her mother and her money and allow herself the time and space to understand and feel all her emotions within the context of her own childhood.

But her greed or obsession with money and lack of courage to walk away keep her in the emotional prison of her mother! And her mother has her exactly where she wants her to be by playing the victim card to get her daughter's attention, then picking her up in her BMW to go out to eat and on little trips to show off her jewelry and how rich she is.

And also, by playing the victim card when she is with her sisters to get them to feel sorry for her and by making them feel guilty, they will be there for her the way she wants them to be, without having to give them anything anymore, because now she is hiding behind her daughter. She can say her daughter is in control of everything! She is getting the best of both worlds! Like they say here in America, she wants to have her cake and eat it too! She has it both ways, just like she likes it!

Her mother is an old lady, but she's still very good at playing the game and directing everyone around her to play the part she wants them to play in her twisted drama. She got exactly what she wanted from the chaos she created, and all the chips fell exactly where she wanted them to —on her side! She is the only winner here! And me! Her daughter was the only link to the family's little dramas, and NOW I'm totally free! Thank you!

"Pain is the way to the truth. By denying that you were unloved as a child, you spare yourself some pain, but you are not with your own truth. And throughout your whole life, you'll try to earn love. In therapy, avoiding pain causes blockage. Yet nobody can confront being neglected or hated without feeling guilty. "It is my fault that my mother is cruel," he thinks. "I made my mother furious; what can I do to make her loving?" So he will continue trying to make her love him. The guilt is really protection against the terrible realization that you are fated to have a mother who cannot love. This is much more painful than to think, "Oh, she is a good mother, it's only me who's bad." Because then you can try to do something to get love. But it's not true; you cannot earn love. And feeling guilty for what has been done to you only supports your blindness and your neurosis."

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2012/12/removing-reins-of-guilt.html

The aunt she hates so much was raised by her mother, so her aunt is a victim of her mother's upbringing as much as she is. They have more in common than she thinks... 

Covert Narcissist

The Security business attracts a lot of these covert and overt narcissists, assholes. 

I like to work until I'm 67 but I'm so tired and burned out of dealing with these type of bullies in the workplace that I think next year, if not sooner, I will leave the workplace for good...  read more about my experience with malignant covert narcissists in the link below:

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/09/bicover-up-by-sociopaths-at-my-ex-job.html

"Many people have fallen victim to the manipulative behaviors of a covert narcissist without realizing what has happened until they are already in emotional pain. Overt narcissists are so much easier to see coming as they are what you might expect - loud, obnoxious and arrogant. 

It is not unusual for people to find themselves in long term relationships with covert narcissists only to be hurt by a sense of a lack of partnership or reciprocity in the relationship." DR. MELANIE CABRERA, PSY

The last covert narcissist I dealt with even looks like the guy in the picture above! 

IDENTIFYING TOXIC PEOPLE

 IDENTIFYING TOXIC PEOPLE

They are controlling. They have to have everything their way. And only agenda they care about is their own. They don't take, "no" for an answer, unless they are manipulating you, or it will ultimately suit their purpose.

They are never wrong!- Even to evidence to the contrary, they will never admit to being wrong. And don't expect an apology from them. Their enormous ego would never even entertain that possibility.

They are draining. You feel depleted every time you are in their presence. Extremely selfish people are like vampires, they suck the life force right out of you.

They are deceptive- They sometimes come in the guise of being helpful and caring. They may even be helpful. But don't be fooled it always comes at a cost. Or they get some narcissistic pleasure from it. They love having their egos stoked, and being told, what great people they are. Meanwhile if you do one thing they don't like, they will bury you in an instant, without even a second thought.

They are liars. They are the most deceptive people you will ever meet. Everything they do, everything they are is set up to deceive, and fulfill their purpose.

They are delusional. They really believe their own lies. They even think they are great people. They have this innate ability to fool everyone including themselves.

Out of the Prison of Confusion

“Even Adolf Hitler never denied that he had been beaten. What he denied was that these beatings were painful. And by totally falsifying his feelings, he would become a mass murderer. That would never have occurred had he been capable of feeling, and weeping about, his situation and had he not repressed his justifiable hatred of those responsible for his distress but consciously experienced and comprehended it. Instead he perverted this hatred into ideology. The same hold for Stalin, Ceausescu, and all the other beaten and humiliated children who later turn into tyrants and criminals. 

The return of the truth only begins to announce itself in the moment that we turn the tables and the word “spanked” condemns itself as heartless testimony to the disrespect and humiliation inflicted on the child. Only once we have become capable of empathizing with the feelings of the abused child we once were, and rejection the mockery and cynicism of our adult selves, do we begin to open the gates to the truth. Only then can we also stop being a danger to others.”  From the book “Breaking Down the Wall of Silence” Alice Miller page15, 16 Chapter "Out of the Prison of Confusion"

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