Healing

Since I have so many quotes from this book on my blog, I decided to order the book. It's really good.

Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse  by Shannon Thomas

Personality disorders are created during childhood and adolescence through a lack of healthy attachments to their primary caregivers.These attachments can be through extreme and repetitive over-indulgence where normal societal rules did not apply to the child and then as a teenager. It is the environment where caregivers chronically covered up for their youth. These individuals came to see others as only a source of making life easier for them. Having a one-sided relationship was the norm. The overindulged child and teenager learned that people are there not as a source of mutual enjoyment. Instead, they are to be used for their own gain. It is not "helicopter parenting," but rather it is a severe lack of boundaries - failing to remind the youth that he or she is one of millions of people in the world. The parental message was that the child and teen are unique, special, and beyond the rules that lowly, normal people must follow. This message wasn't delivered just once and the child became toxic. It encompassed the child's entire upbringing and bled into adulthood. Through the chronic choices of the now personality disordered adult, the lack of attachment patterns from childhood continue.
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Countless individuals seek out self-help books, seminars, counseling, and other opportunities to heal and grow from their upbringing. Why can't narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths do the same thing? They will not simply because they have so thoroughly convinced themselves there is absolutely nothing wrong with them. Nothing. They may give lip service to some of their supposed faults, but their actions do not back up the statements that they have issues to be dealt with and permanently fixed. Any self-awareness they may exhibit is short-lived at best, and true therapeutic work is never sustained. The bottom line: these individuals do not want to change. The way they live their lives works for them, and why wouldn't it? It's all about them. Everything seems to boomerang back to their needs, their wants, their time, their goals, their, their, their. It gets very old for survivors to always live in the shadows of their demands and their expectations.

There is a huge difference between having character defects that must be dealt with and exhibiting the qualities of a personality disordered person. At any given moment, do we all have the ability to be completely self-serving, act manipulatively, be snarky to a stranger, snap at our kids, slam doors in the middle of an adult temper tantrum, or seek our own self-preservation at the expense of someone else? Sure we do. No one would argue people can be real dirtbags at times. However, once the moment of our "toddler-esque" meltdown is over, we feel bad. We realize what jerks we were and are embarrassed that we took our inner annoyances out on other people. We apologize by telling them we're sorry, doing something nice for them, or we inwardly repent for being hostile toward others. We come back to our baseline of being normally empathetic human beings who can reflect on our ridiculous behaviors. Sociopaths and psychopaths cannot do that. They cannot, will not, and do not desire to be self-reflective. They will always blame others and will never, ever change. Why would they? In their own eyes, it's everyone else who is deeply flawed and require fixing.
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Religious organizations are notorious for the clustering of flying monkeys around an abusive person. All in the name of God, hidden abuse is shoved down even further. It is buried under a mound of lies and done so to protect the projection of a perfect religious image. I have witnessed some of the worst forms of flying monkeys while observing toxic churches and their leaders. Not only are people made into flying monkeys to support the gaslighting and smear campaigns against targets, guess who else is developed into a flying monkey? God. God of the Bible is the culture with which I am most familiar, and I can share with you without hesitation, psychological abusers are using God as a flying monkey. They do this by hurling accusations at the survivor about what God would want, what God thinks, and what God says about the survivor's attitude towards the toxic leader. Abusive church leadership must minimize God to a puppet that can be moved around at will, and it smells of blasphemy to me. It is most noticeable in denominations on either extreme of the legalistic or charismatic scale. Two sides of the teeter-totter. This is because in the legalistic church, God is coming to smite those individuals who dare defy His earthly leadership. How dare you, survivor, try to bring any abuse to light? There are rules to be followed and questioning leadership, especially male leadership, is not to be tolerated.

The ability of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths to make flying monkeys out of a number of people should not be taken lightly. They even have the ability to manipulate counseling sessions and some therapists. Yes, therapists can become flying monkeys. Some know they are being used by toxic people. Since the therapists are toxic themselves, it works in favor of the abusers to further harm survivors. Aligning with the abuser against the target brings some level of entertainment for a toxic therapist. I believe this is rare, but I know this type of triangulation does occur. The vast majority of therapists who become flying monkeys, or tools for the abuser to utilize, are therapists who don't realize what they've encountered. The level of manipulation they are dealing with from the unrecognized psychological abuse blinds them to being valuable as therapists. There are many trained mental health professionals who struggle to initially recognize insidious relational abuse. As a therapist, it is hard at times to sort through the issues a couple or family presents. We even have the education and the discernment to help us. At the beginning of therapy, it is a challenge. Becoming a flying monkey to an abuser is a risk if therapists are not keenly aware of the signs and symptoms of hidden abuse.
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Realizing toxic people are not actually insecure is one of the hardest concepts for survivors because thinking toxic people struggle with insecurities is a form of justification for their bad behaviors.

Rather than taking the comments as they were intended, psychological abusers will either lash out or give the silent treatment. Perhaps even a combination of a few different forms of punishment will be utilized. This over-exaggeration often leaves survivors dumb-founded and initially they blame themselves for not choosing their words more carefully. The truth is there is no right way to deliver a correction, or talk about dissatisfaction with narcissists, sociopaths, or psychopaths. They will not take any concerns seriously, and will in fact turn the situation around on survivors. It becomes the survivor's fault for being so rude, disrespectful, and is upsetting them. Personality disordered people do not take too favorably to having their faults pointed out, regardless of how gently the topic is broached.

Intermittent reinforcement: conditioning the survivor to always be off-balance (survivor is left confused, walking on egg shells, and tightly hanging on to the abuser's ever-changing moods).
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Toxic people cannot sustain any length of relationship connection (i.e. the good old days). As mentioned before, their lack of healthy attachments while growing up, and their refusal to deal with their flaws, creates the perfect storm for their inability to have stable relationships.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Discard The target  was acquired (Idealize phase), the target was emotionally harmed (Devalue phase), and now we begin the grand finale of rejecting the target (Discard phase). The reason this last phase differs from other relationship endings is because a survivor is left -not only with the loss of connection- but their entire personhood has been shredded as well. A survivor's body is often in need of physical healing because of the psychological abuse. Their self-image has been altered. Often times there are huge lifestyle losses that have come along while in the abuse. By the time the Discard  phase occurs, a survivor's world is unsafe and in upheaval. Again, there is the spectrum of abusive behaviors and a spectrum of survivor responses. For the majority of survivors, encounters with psychological abusers have a life-altering result. The level of impact on a target's life will also be different depending on whether the abuse took place in a marriage or relationship at work, among peers, in a family, or at church. The closer the abuser is to the center of a survivor's daily life, the more damage that can be perpetrated.

The discard by the psychological abuser is often very evil and shaming. I have heard all sorts of different stories about how discards can take place, and they leave me grieving for the survivors. If you have been discarded by an abuser, I am sure you have your own set of battle scars. Road rash from having been tossed from a moving relationship vehicle. Perhaps you were the one to end the relationship. Believe me when I say that I know you did not escape easily. By the time survivors are compelled to leave their psychologically abusive relationships, they do not see any other viable option but to leave. They have tried anything and everything to keep their relationship going. No matter how hard they tried to fit the mold the abuser wanted, it was never enough. Never good enough, and always somehow wrong.
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Research shows it takes people many attempts to leave unhealthy relationships