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.

Deceptive Self-Disclosures

In the old days, this used to be called 'boasting' or 'bragging'.

Some people aren't very good at it; the brags and boasts are obvious. They drop names. They start every sentence with "I did..." "I know..." "I have..." "I went..." -- I, I, I.

Others are slightly more subtle. "My best friend has..." "Our second house..." "When we were in [expensive resort]..."

Others are downright insidious. "Oh goodness, I couldn't hate someone if my life depended on it." "You all know me, I couldn't carry a grudge if I had six strong men helping me." "Well, I just love people so much, I can't ever really stay angry at anyone."

Boasting or bragging directly about material possessions, wealth, and status are pretty obvious indicators of vanity and insecurity. Boasting or bragging indirectly about such things also indicates vanity and insecurity. It's easy to identify what's going on, and it's even possible to feel compassion for the people who engage in it. It's obvious; they're fragile.

There are competitive undertones, however, that we ignore at our peril, since people who are this insecure and vain are also usually driven by a terrible fear of loss; if they only value themselves for what they own, then showing them our own treasures is a very risky move, as they may feel threatened by anyone who has 'more' or 'better' anything than themselves.

Boasting or bragging directly or indirectly about one's own character, however, is on a different level. This is the territory of manipulation, sleight-of-hand, deception. Call it advertising, or even propaganda, if it's in a political context. And ask yourself why it's going on.

Why would someone feel a need to announce repeatedly to the world what kind of person they are? Don't their actions tell us enough about them without the need for voice over narration to drum it into our heads?

Usually, when a message of this type is being endlessly repeated in our ears, it is intended to distract our attention, and prevent us from looking closely at the actual behavior of the person repeating their self-praise mantra.

In fact, everyone who has been deliberately abused - at home, at school, in a social setting, or on the job - has probably been frustrated by the fact that their abuser shows one face to them, and quite another to the public - and the public face usually includes this kind of boasting and bragging about the goodness, kindness, patience, and tolerance of the abuser, along with some kind of implied or overt comparison intended to put down the target of their abuse.

This is nothing but product positioning, in marketplace language. Creating a 'brand identity' that has little or no connection to the reality of what you get when you actually open the package. And making sure that the target of abuse is firmly identified as "brand X", the inferior product, in the minds of the studio audience.

Character propagandizing can be a harmless, rather sad exercise in self-promotion, if there is no abuse associated with it. It can be a very harmful exercise in group deception, however, if the same person who praises themselves to the skies is, in fact, bullying or abusing others and relying on a steady stream of self-promotion to cloud awareness of the fact.

Watch for this. Whenever someone makes announcements about their own character, start looking for the evidence they don't want you to see. The more time they spend telling you what they're like, the more likely it is that they're trying to keep you from seeing the kind of person they really are.

Watch What they Do, Not What They Say

She was kind to strangers because she wanted to convince them that she was a lovely dear person; she was savage to her family because she could get away with it - they were in no position to leave her, and she knew that nobody would ever believe them.

Being sweet as honey to outsiders while being shockingly vicious to your near and dear is standard operating procedure for abusers of all types - emotional abusers, child abusers, spouse batterers.

Most people are easily taken in by a charming performance; this may partly come from mental laziness, but I believe it's largely due to the fact that we are immersed in a culture that values 'positivity' far more than realism, and almost literally worships 'winners' while it scapegoats anyone branded a 'loser'.

As a result, all too often when an abused spouse or child attempts to get help or a hearing from family or friends, the people they talk to have been pre-emptively fooled by the abuser, and won't believe them. There are few crueler, or more blatantly selfish, forms of human folly on earth than the entrenched belief that "A can't possibly be abusing B because A is so polite to me." Thus do abusers literally get away with murder.

In a depressing variation on the deception theme, abusers sometimes fool even mental health professionals and legal authorities; the abusers are calm and suave, while the person seeking help is clearly distraught. All too often, the source of distress is not understood, and it's much simpler and easier to 'write off' the weaker-seeming party. And sadly, those who simply and openly prefer to identify with abusers may be found among mental health professionals and legal authorities, as well. After all, these positions are powerful... and abusers are drawn to power.

Never believe that a person is their 'image' - especially when their 'image' is extremely important to them, and they seem heavily, overly invested in protecting it. Images are just that: a deliberate creation.

Don't believe what people say. Watch what they actually do, especially to people like waiters, waitresses, janitors, etc., and even more especially when they don't think anyone is looking.

It may take a little longer, and it may require a bit more effort, but it pays off.