GoodPersonEffed
Brevity is my middle name, but my name was TL
- Jan 11, 2020
- 6,726
While Fixthe26 and others are waging war against the site with lies and manipulations, I noticed that there is a very human and compassionate tendency to want to soften one's defenses against a grieving parent. Meanwhile, they just keep throwing punches anywhere they choose. They don't see our struggles as sacred. They don't show honor to even a portion of the membership, nor do they acknowledge how many of us have posted to show them compassion, even defend them when one of our own is crossing the line, such as outright blaming them for their children's deaths when we have no idea what went on in those personal relationships and situations.
One can defend themselves, fight clean when being fought against, and do both with dignity and honor. One can also choose to not respond to provocation. Likewise, one does not have to sit back and allow someone to throw and smear shit all over them just because the one doing it is grieving. It's not just shit, they're throwing shit with rocks and arrows inside. They're aiming to hurt. They want us to be covered in toxicity and take it in our pores. They aim to intimidate, even the weakest of us, not just the site owners, forgetting that their own children were members they would have intimidated, which is an act to control, not to help. They fight like the ends justify the means, and so they unethically fight what they present as a moral war.
I encourage each of us, should you want to be encouraged, to not be a victim. They play mind games, and it's so easy to be persuaded to lower one's guard and then get painfully wounded for it. So if you want such encouragement, I offer you three tools.
One can defend themselves, fight clean when being fought against, and do both with dignity and honor. One can also choose to not respond to provocation. Likewise, one does not have to sit back and allow someone to throw and smear shit all over them just because the one doing it is grieving. It's not just shit, they're throwing shit with rocks and arrows inside. They're aiming to hurt. They want us to be covered in toxicity and take it in our pores. They aim to intimidate, even the weakest of us, not just the site owners, forgetting that their own children were members they would have intimidated, which is an act to control, not to help. They fight like the ends justify the means, and so they unethically fight what they present as a moral war.
I encourage each of us, should you want to be encouraged, to not be a victim. They play mind games, and it's so easy to be persuaded to lower one's guard and then get painfully wounded for it. So if you want such encouragement, I offer you three tools.
The first tool is the Manipulation Tactics thread, which you can use to evaluate their rhetoric and how they respond in conversations.
The second tool is to notice when you're scared or have anxiety. They want us to be afraid that the site will be shut down, that our posts will be screenshotted, that we will be outed, etc. Fear is a powerful tool that shuts down reasoning and sets off the fight, flight, freeze or tend-and-befriend response. As soon as you recognize you're in a fear-based state, you can quickly reengage the calmer, more rational right side of your brain by asking yourself the question: "What could I do about this?" It will get you back into a problem-solving mode in the right brain, and out of an emotionally heightened mode in the left brain, amygdala, or limbic portion of the brain.
The third tool is the following list from notes I took from George Simon's book In Sheep's Clothing. They're some of the weaknesses a manipulator can exploit which can result in one being victimized. If you can recognize these things about yourself and how they motivate responses that either keep you from protecting yourself or get you provoked to act out, then you can better take care of yourself and not get caught up in the manipulations:
1.NAIVETÉ. You may be one of those individuals who finds it too hard to accept the notion that there really are people as cunning, devious, and ruthless as your gut tells you the manipulator in your life is. That is, you may even be prone to engage in "neurotic" denial. If you are, even when you're confronted with abundant evidence you're dealing with a ruthless conniver, you may refuse to believe it, reluctantly accepting reality only after being victimized too often.
2.OVER-CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. Ask yourself if you're one of those people who is much harder on themselves that anybody else. You might be the kind of person who is too willing to give a would-be manipulator the benefit of the doubt (such as a grieving parent). When they do something to hurt you, you may be too ready to see their side of things and too willing to blame yourself or hold back when they go on the attack and throw you on the defensive. If you have extremely high ethics, they may take advantage of that. For example, they may tell you something false about someone else because you never divulge private conversations, when in fact you may need to talk to that other person to verify what you've been told so that you don't harbor false beliefs or prejudices. An extreme example is having a rigid ethic to never lie, but if a murderer wants to know if your children are at home, the safest and wisest response is to lie.
3.LOW SELF-CONFIDENCE. You may be one of those persons who is overly self-doubting, or chronically unsure of your right to pursue your legitimate wants and needs. You may lack confidence about your ability to face conflicts directly and resolve them effectively. If so, you're likely to prematurely quit asserting yourself and also likely to go on the defensive too easily when challenged by an aggressive personality.
4.OVER-INTELLECTUALIZATION. You may be one of those persons who tries too hard to understand. If you're also one who assumes that people only do hurtful things when there's some legitimate, understandable reason, you might delude yourself into believing that uncovering and understanding all the reasons for a manipulator's behavior will be sufficient to make things different. Sometimes, by being overly focused on the possible reasons for a behavior, you may inadvertently excuse it. Other times, you might get so wrapped up in trying to understand what's going on that you forget that someone is merely fighting to gain advantage over you and that you should be devoting your time and energy to taking necessary steps to protect and empower yourself. If you over-intellectualize, you'll likely have trouble accepting the simple philosophy that there are people in this world who fight underhandedly, and for no other purpose than to get what they want.
5.EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY. You may have submissive personality characteristics rooted in deep fears of independence and autonomy. If so, you might be attracted to the more confident-appearing, independent, aggressive personalities in the first place. After becoming involved in a relationship with them, you may also tend to let such people run over you out of fear that if you stand up to them you may be "abandoned" altogether. The more emotionally dependent you are on someone, the more vulnerable you are to being exploited and manipulated by them.
1.NAIVETÉ. You may be one of those individuals who finds it too hard to accept the notion that there really are people as cunning, devious, and ruthless as your gut tells you the manipulator in your life is. That is, you may even be prone to engage in "neurotic" denial. If you are, even when you're confronted with abundant evidence you're dealing with a ruthless conniver, you may refuse to believe it, reluctantly accepting reality only after being victimized too often.
2.OVER-CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. Ask yourself if you're one of those people who is much harder on themselves that anybody else. You might be the kind of person who is too willing to give a would-be manipulator the benefit of the doubt (such as a grieving parent). When they do something to hurt you, you may be too ready to see their side of things and too willing to blame yourself or hold back when they go on the attack and throw you on the defensive. If you have extremely high ethics, they may take advantage of that. For example, they may tell you something false about someone else because you never divulge private conversations, when in fact you may need to talk to that other person to verify what you've been told so that you don't harbor false beliefs or prejudices. An extreme example is having a rigid ethic to never lie, but if a murderer wants to know if your children are at home, the safest and wisest response is to lie.
3.LOW SELF-CONFIDENCE. You may be one of those persons who is overly self-doubting, or chronically unsure of your right to pursue your legitimate wants and needs. You may lack confidence about your ability to face conflicts directly and resolve them effectively. If so, you're likely to prematurely quit asserting yourself and also likely to go on the defensive too easily when challenged by an aggressive personality.
4.OVER-INTELLECTUALIZATION. You may be one of those persons who tries too hard to understand. If you're also one who assumes that people only do hurtful things when there's some legitimate, understandable reason, you might delude yourself into believing that uncovering and understanding all the reasons for a manipulator's behavior will be sufficient to make things different. Sometimes, by being overly focused on the possible reasons for a behavior, you may inadvertently excuse it. Other times, you might get so wrapped up in trying to understand what's going on that you forget that someone is merely fighting to gain advantage over you and that you should be devoting your time and energy to taking necessary steps to protect and empower yourself. If you over-intellectualize, you'll likely have trouble accepting the simple philosophy that there are people in this world who fight underhandedly, and for no other purpose than to get what they want.
5.EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY. You may have submissive personality characteristics rooted in deep fears of independence and autonomy. If so, you might be attracted to the more confident-appearing, independent, aggressive personalities in the first place. After becoming involved in a relationship with them, you may also tend to let such people run over you out of fear that if you stand up to them you may be "abandoned" altogether. The more emotionally dependent you are on someone, the more vulnerable you are to being exploited and manipulated by them.
