Masters of Deception

Jordie, who blogs from Australia, has kindly given me permission to excerpt one of her recent blog posts here. Her blog focuses on spiritual abuse, but as you will see, the concepts are universally applicable. And her exposition is too good to miss....

.... The magicians Penn & Teller have been known to, as part of their act, explain sleight of hand while demonstrating it with a performance by Teller, appearing to only light a cigarette. While Teller performs, Penn describes what he is doing, and explains the seven principles of Sleight of Hand.
The Seven Principles are:
1.Palm - To hold an object in an apparently empty hand.
2. Switch - To secretly exchange one object for another.
3. Misdirection - To lead attention away from a secret move.
4. Simulation - To give the impression that something that hasn't happened, has.
5. Load - To secretly move a needed object to where it is needed.
6. Steal - To secretly obtain a needed object.
7. Ditch - To secretly dispose of an unneeded object

The comment from this video which struck me as most astute and relevant was the comment by Teller (or was it Penn...the guy with the guitar anyway) "Looks simple doesn't it...but when you are dealing with a master of deception...... even the simplest activity may be a complex deception". The life of a deceiver is very complicated. They have to keep all the balls in the air (sorry to mix the metaphor) at the same time, and have techniques in place to explain any oversights or mistakes. The truth is the enemy of all deceivers.

As I heard this sentence, I immediately thought of my own experience with masters of deception. Its true. Every activity which they undertook, whether it was preaching on a Sunday, visiting a sick person in hospital, caring for the 'widows and orphans' or investing the church's money, everything had an ulterior motive, and that motive was unfailingly about their own selfish ambitions. They treated the truth with the same 'sleight of hand' that these magicians treat their magic tricks. A magician gets up on a stage elevated from the audience and distanced somewhat so that nobody can see what they are up to 'up close'. The minute the magician reveals his 'tricks' you can see that if you had the right perspective, you would have realised what he was doing and the illusion would have been punctured.

It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. "Take no notice of the man behind the curtain". Remember that the real wizard, the man behind the curtain, was working away feverishly at his buttons and levers in order to create the illusion that he was somebody else. Once he was discovered, he used a very clever, but often used counter-illusion. He made his pretend wizard warn the characters about the real 'wizard'. He takes an element of the truth, admits that there is in fact a man behind the curtain, but explains it away to maintain the illusion that the image of the wizard is in control. In the case of our cult, once somebody discovered the man behind the curtain, the 'wizards' worked feverishly at their buttons and levers to maintain the illusion that they were still in control. They did this by warning the congregation to take no notice of the person who had discovered the man behind the curtain. They turned the congregation against the one who dared oppose them, and effectively squashed those people by character assassination. It worked well.

This is just the beginning of a fascinating exposition. Here's the rest of it.

"Luella Miller" - Narcissism in a Velvet Gown

I first read this story as a teen, and it has haunted me ever since. The older I get, the more I see in it; it's not just a ghost story, it's not just a horror story, it's a case study, and one of the most psychologically literate things I've read since Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper".

I'm not sure how widely known this short story is, or the author, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman; but it and she both deserve to be very widely known indeed. Especially by those who have been subjected to covert emotional abuse, and the kind of manipulation that poses as helplessness even as it takes total control of the helper. There is a cautionary tale here for Rescuers and Enablers; not even the most perceptive person in the story manages to escape, in the end.

Here, then, is a link to the Literary Gothic web site's page on "Luella Miller". Read. Enjoy. See what you find in it. And please respect the site owner's wishes; don't copy the text online.

Is there, was there, a Luella in your life? I know there was in mine... Luella Miller is a psychic vampire. Ms. Freeman had clearly known and observed at least one of these creatures in her own life. Luella Miller epitomizes them - their affectations of helplessness, their entitlement, their total self-centeredness. One after another, she uses people, and uses them up, until they literally die - not quickly, either, and certainly not painlessly. Their suffering doesn't register with her at all; their deaths leave her absolutely unmoved, except for concerns that she won't get her coffee in the morning if her current victim is too busy dying to make it for her.

This is a classic portrait of narcissism - the sugar-coated kind; the kind that dresses in velvet, wears lace gloves, stamps its dainty foot and puts its little nose in the air when facing someone who sees its essential evil. But the tantrums Luella throws when she thinks a victim is about to get out of her clutches show an amazing degree of 'strength' for such a helpless li'l ol' thing.

Reading this now, I see both my mother and myself, our lives and our fates.

In her youth, my mother had the Luella act down pat. Strikingly beautiful, she knew exactly how to bat her eyelashes and croon, and people fell for it - over and over. She fooled them, she used them, and they came running back for more. It wasn't until she was long past middle age that she began to lose the knack of fooling people; partly because she no longer cared so much about fooling them - she wasn't willing to work at it anymore. But there were quite a few people she fooled until the very end.

At least some of those people, I think, took over from her at some point, and generously took on the burden of fooling themselves on her behalf. This was doubtless less painful for them than facing and truly admitting the kind of person she actually was: malicious, vindictive, calculating, deliberately distorting and withholding information to demonize anyone who refused to worship her - including her own child. Better to stay soothingly unaware...

After her death, there were some waves of awareness / revulsion among her few remaining friends and acquaintances; some even contacted me, embarrassed, remorseful, to make amends for wrongs I had never known about. There were so many lies she had told, so much she had confabulated, to keep these people from ever wanting to know me - so that they would never be able to see through the confabulations and lies. It was almost unbelievable. I thought I had seen through her years ago, but at the end of her life, I found myself amazed at the things she had done to me almost from the minute I was born.

Luella Miller's fictitiously fantastic indifference to the condition of those who served her, even as they were dying, is also neither fantastic nor fictitious. I saw it in my mother during my father's final illness. Not merely indifference; absolute, blind, infantile rage, that he would dare to get sick when that was - and always had been - HER privilege.

She was similarly self-centered when her own daughter needed surgery for a life-threatening condition. I carefully scheduled myself into a hospital that was far enough away for her to be unable to visit me. She had pulled Munchausen's by Proxy stunts on my sick and dying father, and she wasn't going to pull any on me. The nurses though it odd that she never even called... knowing what I know about enabling, I never even tried to explain to them.

For my part, I see all too much of myself in Lydia. I remember how hard I fought to get free. How determined my mother was to fasten on to me, financially and emotionally, and drain and destroy me just as she drained and destroyed my father. And I know very well that although I escaped alive, I did not escape unharmed.

I am very grateful, and will always be grateful, to the therapist - and the elder law attorneys - who supported me through the last two years of my mother's life, and after her death; they had seen enough similar cases to know just how destructive these people are, and they were able not only to believe me, but to understand. Yet I still find myself drawn into helping those who give in return only indifference, further demands, or outright harm. Like Lydia, I find myself all too often confronting and denouncing narcissists in velvet gowns, while trapped in the cottage next door.

Lately I've wished that when I first read this story as a teen, I had understood it then as I understand it now - that I had seen through my mother much earlier, and escaped emotionally when I first escaped physically, thirty years ago. But that's not what happened, and we all have to play the cards we're dealt. I can be grateful, at least, that now I see what was.

And that, almost a decade after her death, I have finally written her eulogy.

May she rest in peace... and may peace rest in me.

Getting Well, Part 7: Deep Safety

Geologists, paleontologists, and physicists all deal with "deep time". It is the time required for planets to form... species to evolve... continents to drift. It is measured in units of millenia... epochs... eons.

In my own halting journey as an abuse survivor, I have lately been contemplating "deep safety". This is a concept of safety that goes beyond the simple physical and emotional self-protection that one individual can practice; it is communitarian, and it is multidimensional. It is, in simplest terms, the Social Contract raised to the level of a sacrament.

It has also, I have discovered, been profoundly mapped and explored by Sandra Bloom, M.D.; the term she uses for it is "Sanctuary".

This is a fitting term. In Western religion, the first description of sanctuary is found in the Pentateuch; in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, there are designated "cities of refuge", where fugitives could seek shelter. The custom was also observed in Ancient Greece and in medieval Europe, particularly England, where fugitives fled to churches and cloisters for protection from persecution by arbitrary and capricious temporal authorities, whose exercise of power was otherwise unchecked.

Sanctuary, then, was refuge, asylum, shelter, protection. It was not extended universally and uncritically - but it was extended generously and without betrayal, to many who would otherwise have been arbitrarily destroyed.

In my experience, most survivors of abuse have a profound, even consuming desire for a place of deep safety. This does not represent mere regressive desire for infantilized caretaking, but is a genuine and valid need for an external environment which is healthy, restorative, and profoundly honest. Abuse survivors need such an environment in order to fully recover from the effects of their experiences. Tragically, this need is often so intense that unsafe environments are dreamed into places of safety, just as abusers may be dreamed into charming princes, and the net result is further, often more severe, retraumatization and a deep sense of self- and other-engendered betrayal. And thus the cycle of abuse continues.

What are the elements of deep safety? Bloom considers four:

-physical safety, which is basic safety from harm;
-psychological safety, which she defines as the ability to preserve one's safety in the world, built upon self-discipline, self-esteem, self-control, self-awareness, and self-respect;
-social safety, defined as the ability to be safe with others in relationships and other social settings [this would include churches, clubs, workplaces, support groups and recovery groups];
-moral/ethical safety, which is the ability to maintain standards, beliefs and principles that are consistent, guide behavior, and are grounded in respect for life.

These elements assure that a person, family, group, or organization will be "trauma-sensitive", in Bloom's terminology; there will be a culture of nonviolence, that is emotionally intelligent, committed to inquiry and social learning, with shared governance in that members learn self-control, self-discipline, and the ability to recognize and cooperate with healthy authority.

Crucially, she also notes that such a culture requires open communication - essential to the reduction of acting out, to healthy self-protection, to the establishment and maintenance of healthy boundaries, and to self-correction. In such an atmosphere, social responsibility easily becomes a shared positive norm, and growth and change are embraced as key to the restoration of hope, meaning, and purpose for all members.

Bloom's approach stems from extensive experience with trauma survivors, which gave her a fundamental awareness that support and recovery for trauma survivors absolutely requires an enviroment which does not re-traumatize them. In her own words, "...teaching and reorientation... cannot be successful if the treatment environment mimics the behaviors of the dysfunctional systems... experienced as children." She goes on to note that any dysfunctional system may be characterized by collective denial of problems, shared shameful secrets, a lack of honesty between system members, and "a web of lies that is difficult to penetrate". There are often "unclear and shifting roles... boundaries are diffuse and confusing... There is poor tolerance for differences and no good mechanism for conflict resolution. Instead of resolving conflicts they are kept submerged... if they finally rise to the surface they are dealt with in a highly moralistic and usually hypocritical way."

She also notes [as do Judith Wyatt and Chauncey Hare, with respect to abusive workplace environments] the strong internalization of negative norms by survivors of dysfunctional systems. These are norms such as denial, coercion, secrecy, and manipulation [her list], "cloaked and given other words like "privacy", "loyalty", 'self-sacrifice", and "obedience" so that the individual... subject to such norms becomes cognitively confused - accepting the verbal interpretation while nonverbally sensing the more hostile aspects of the environment... Additionally, a coercive system makes it clear that there is no tolerance for questioning this double and contradictory level of meaning and any attempt to do so is labeled as "disloyalty"... and... summarily punished."

This is an uncannily accurate description of every abusive environment I recall from my own experience. I have gradually come to believe that it is impossible to speak to and engender healing of any kind in such environments. One cannot address any pertinent issue gently enough to avoid provoking distortion, projection, retaliation; because the real issue is not one's gentleness or tact, but one's heresy. To see what goes on beneath the surface of any dysfunctional system is suspect; to articulate it is anathema. The game is always rigged; the house always wins.

What then can be done?

First - one must be aware, and one must hold that awareness as if it were a sacred trust. In many ways, it is. To become aware, one must learn; to learn, it is wise to read. This link will take you to Dr. Bloom's publications page, on her Web site. It is an excellent place to learn about deep safety - how to recognize it, how to contribute to it, how to avoid counterfeits.

Second - one must seek to detach. This is much harder to do, always, than to say, or to pretend to do. To fully detach, one must emotionally divest oneself, and this is very, very difficult when in pain or fear. But it is even more difficult when in the 'throes of hope' - and that is when it is most necessary. To seek detachment, to know that it is necessary for healing, is enough of a start.

Third - one must learn to trust one's own judgement. Hare and Wyatt, in the book linked to at their names above, describe ways to do this while immersed in an abusive environment. However, it is inevitable that with greater awareness and greater self-trust comes greater unwillingness to remain in, and thus tacitly collude with, an abusive system; then one must trust oneself enough to know when it is safe to leave - or less safe to leave than to stay.

Fourth - and highly important - one must learn to recognize abusive systems as quickly as possible upon entering them, and remain detached enough not to prematurely invest in them. This is really no different than learning to be less susceptible to charmers offering whirlwind romance, or to cults proffering cures for your soul - if you will but sell it to them. It isn't necessary to despise or condemn any system in order to leave it, but it is necessary to see as clearly as possible, and to be able to accept what you see, even when painful [because it will always be painful; there is no anesthesia for the loss of hope].

Finally, and crucially - one must remain detached enough to be able to recognize if a previously safe place is becoming unsafe. Sadly, negative norms are very powerful, and 'stealth abusers' often take advantage of courtesy combined with cluelessness to establish themselves as influential members in groups. They do this in workplaces by conning interviewers during the hiring process; they do it in churches and other groups, by presenting a 'facade' which may not match their actions in significant ways, but goes unchallenged because 'nobody wants to be impolite'. Any system, once so infiltrated, becomes progressively less safe as the abusers within feel more safe, and thus more free to abuse. It is important to recognize this when it occurs, and not to accept blame for causing it merely because you happen to see it.

Deep safety. Earnestly we seek it; our souls thirst for it; our bodies long for it, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. We have seen it in the sanctuary, and beheld its power and its glory...

Getting Well, Part 2: Stinkin' Thinkin' - the 12-Step Perspective

Stinkin' thinkin' is a familiar phrase in 12-Step and other recovery programs. In these programs, it stands for the types of distorted thinking that addicts and enablers [co-dependents] have either learned or been taught, thinking which preserves both the addiction and the co-dependent relationship to the addict and the addiction.

Cognitive therapy also refers to stinkin' thinkin', in terms of self-defeating tapes and scripts that foster depression and estrangement from others and oneself.

I see both similarities and differences between the 'cognitive therapy' and '12-step' concepts. Both focus on teaching us to see how we use conceptual distortions to preserve an unhealthy situation, whether it be the addictive-codependent relationship [12-step] or other painful and unproductive ways of seeing and relating to the world and one's circumstances [cognitive].

In my assessment, a primary objective of cognitive therapy is to encourage people to take appropriate responsibility and a greater sense of their own power. However, most recovering addicts and codependents first need to address feelings of entitlement and the right to dominate others, as well as feelings of entrapment and overwhelming responsibility for other people and entire situations. Weirdly enough, these feelings can coexist, and often do - resulting in significant cognitive dissonance, sometimes to the point of virtually disabling rational processing.

Speaking from my own experience, the 12-step definition of stinkin' thinkin' is a solid starting place for people who have become aware of abuse in their families or elsewhere and are trying to break denial and escape from abusive patterns and partners. The last thing a codependent needs to hear is that he or she is entirely responsible for how the world treats him or her... because this is exactly the idea that the addict, or other abuser, has been feeding to the codependent all along, in order to keep the codependent... codependent. [I drink, I drug, I beat, I cheat, and it's All YOUR Fault.]

What are some examples of addictive and codependent stinkin' thinkin'? The 12-step site I've linked to above presents some real gems: I quote them below, in italics, with thanks, and interpret the distortion at play in each one, in brackets behind it.

1. Problems will go away if I ignore them. [Denial is a valid method of problemsolving. I have the right to expect problems to solve themselves, without any expenditure of effort on my part.]

2. Life will be better when I find a man to love me and I leave home to live with him. [Dependence is preferable to independence and individuation. See the Karpman Rescue element here?]

3. A woman cannot be really happy without a man. [Dependence is preferable to independence and individuation; to be alone is to be inferior, or to have failed; even an abusive relationship is better than being alone.]

4. It's ok for men to be a little rough because "boys will be boys." [Men, because they are men, are exempted from exercising adult self-control. Abuse is excusable and an inevitable price that women pay to have relationships with men. This distortion is also used by parents as an excuse to avoid the unpleasant and demanding task of appropriately disciplining their male children. With predictable results. The counterpart to this distortion is that it's OK for women to be weak and entirely dependent on men for everything up to and including their sense of self. See 2. and 3. above.]

5. Those I love should love me. [Love is a magically transforming emotion and it is not my responsibility to bestow it wisely. The healthy concept, of which this is a distorted shadow, is: I am wisest to treat all persons with appropriate respect, but to give my love only to people who are themselves capable of love.]

6. I should not have to make an effort to get the things I want and need. [Dependence is my birthright - it is the responsibility of my loved ones, indeed of the whole inanimate universe, to read my mind and do good things for me.]

7. A woman is limited because "It's a man's world". [Tricky one, this. Prejudice is real, including sexism, but it doesn't have to be accepted, it can be resisted. This presentation seems to offer it as a welcome excuse for failure. Dependency again.]

8. Other people should be fair and loving. [Indeed, they should be. And so should we. The problem is, none of us are able to be fair and loving all the time, and many people are not fair and loving at all. Merely wishing that they were will not make it so, nor does it absolve us of the responsibility to learn to recognize who is and who isn't, and protect ourselves appropriately.]

You can see the pattern of distortion here. We are totally helpless in the face of abuse and arbitrarily imposed limitations, while at the same time we are, somehow, totally responsible for the fact of their existence. Meanwhile, Karpman fantasies of rescue and entitlement [something for nothing - we deserve to be rescued and given all good things] are proffered in the place of realistic self-empowerment and the acceptance of adult responsibility.

First we need to learn how pervasive this thinking is in our own abusive relationships [whether in marriage, workplace, friendships, church, or elsewhere]; then we need to reach the point where we can identify these distortions the moment they arise in our thoughts. We must, in other words, become sufficiently detached from these ways of thinking and seeing the world that they are no longer an instinctive, reflexive response, but are more like something outside of us.

This takes practice. This takes effort. This takes awareness. There are no shortcuts.

Once we have reached the point where we have seen and stepped outside these distortions, we can then turn to cognitive therapy to teach us more about appropriate responsibility, appropriate empowerment, appropriate ownership of that which is truly ours, including our true birthrights as full members of the flawed, fallible, fantastic human race.

Getting Well, Part 1: Getting Out

"Someone's got to be unafraid to lead the freak parade."

That's pretty much what it boils down to, once someone realizes they're living in a reality created by abusers, for abusers.

That reality is inverted; it's toxic. It devalues, uses and exploits, destroys emotional and physical health, and will ultimately kill.

It is also extremely secretive, extremely invested in maintaining appearances at the expense of group and individual health. There is a powerful sense of shame associated with looking 'too closely' at the values and assumptions of any dysfunctional group - as though it isn't nice to see clearly.

The very thought that Mother might resent Daughter and regard her as competition, that Father might regard Son as an appliance to be used to compete with the neighbors or his own siblings or parents, that parents might use their children as puppets to act out their own hostility... that Boss might favor Secretary while scapegoating Paralegal... these thoughts are rejected as 'morbid' or worse; the myth of the Happy Family [at home, work, or elsewhere] must be protected and preserved at all costs. "Lookin' good" is paramount; nothing else, not even one's own sanity, matters by comparison.

But as AA, Al-Anon, and other recovery groups put it, we are 'as sick as our secrets'. Groups - whether they are families, church committees, or workplace cliques, can be every bit as sick as individuals.

In the words of C.S. Lewis ["The Problem of Pain", 1962]:

“We must guard against the feeling that there is "safety in numbers". ... many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society - some particular school, college, regiment, or profession - where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal ("Everyone does it") and certain others as impracticably virtuous and quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our "normal" was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our "quixotic" was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the "pocket" turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed."

To 'emerge from that bad society', requires the breaking of denial, and takes a great deal of courage and determination. It is not easy, and it is not quick. There may be very intense 'change-back' reactions from family, friends, co-workers, church members. There may be immediate ostracism, breathtaking in its cruelty. There will almost certainly be invalidation, whether directly [targeted at the escaping member] or indirectly [use of the escaping member as a Horrible Example, to keep other members in line]. The would-be escapee will be made to feel wrong; bad; crazy. And very, very much alone.

Yes, this does sound like escaping a cult, doesn't it? That, in many ways, is exactly what it is. Cult members are rejected and vilified when they challenge the assumptions of the cult, and place their own emotional welfare ahead of preserving the cult's image; so, too, the child of an alcoholic parent who refuses to play his or her assigned 'role' in the alcoholic family drama and suppport the family myth will be vilified and rejected. As will the 'problem employee' who refuses to engage in the shaming and blaming cycles at an abusive workplace. Or the 'difficult patient' in a stalled therapy group, who persists in seeing and challenging unhealthy processes that are preventing growth.

It is sad but true - in this, as in every other stage of growth, we almost always must make the transition alone. But also true, and much less sad, is that when one person finds the door, others, watching, may eventually make their own escapes.

After all, "Someone's got to be unafraid to lead the freak parade." It may very well be the most important public service you ever perform.