tsuki

This is the survival strategy that we've been built to use. Let me use an analogy. There are things that the physical body is meant to do, and there are limits to it. There are degrees to how you can move your ankle. You can twist it few degrees around your calf, but don't twist it 180 degrees. Your psyche is like this to some degree. There are things that you can freely experience, but there are things that are too extreme. Seeing your father hit your mother is like twisting your ankle 180 degrees. It will "sprain" your spirit, leave a trauma. So, let's say a soldier sprained his ankle under fire and ignores it to keep moving. This tactic works well short-term, but is lethal long-term. It is very difficult to live your whole life with an untreated sprained ankle, you gotta do this. Moving about with it will make it worse, so you are forced to stop and heal. Psychological trauma is similar. When you are three, you don't have the mental capacity to process the experience of being abused. You have no framework of evil that accounts for the possibility for your father to hit your mother. As a child, your father, by definition, cannot be evil. You fitting in with your family is absolutely crucial if your want to survive. So what is the way out? Denial. You deny that you have seen this and keep on like a soldier. This is a good strategy short term, but lethal long-term. This will haunt you like a sprained ankle you ignore. You have to stop and heal, to go back in memories and actually understand what was happening and express the stored emotions. The question is, how long can you keep ignoring your sprained spirit until it is unbearable? It depends on the depth of the wound that has been inflicted. Paradoxically, the deeper the wound, the longer you have to deny it. For example, how long does it take for a Jew to process the experience of seeing their loved one raped and killed in a gas chamber? Some wounds are too great to heal in one lifetime, so they are passed on to the next generation. Each generation does some of the work until it can be properly processed. You could say that we are, psychologically, one organism. We are still haunted by the shadows of the world war II. This is a fault of the judicial system that has no understanding of how trauma works. I'm guessing that it's because men are more likely to lash out physically against women and bruises are easier to prove, so women are automatically called the victims of oppressors to close cases. In my experience, no more lethal force exists than a woman that knows your triggers and is dead set on making you feel miserable as a man. This is all I'm willing to say before people get triggered. As for victim blaming, nobody deserves abuse, regardless of what they believe, how they feel, dress, or act. This is the biggest mistake people usually do with their trauma. Your behavior has nothing to do with me. You can speak whatever you want and it has nothing, zero, to do with me. If I feel anything in response to this, these feelings are my own doing and they are telling me things about me. If I feel sexually aroused in response to a girl that is frivolously dressed, this tells me about me. Not about her. She is not a slut because I am aroused. She may have known that I will be aroused when she dresses like this, but my arousal is my thing and gives me no right to do anything. This usually goes over people's heads. People are at the mercy of their own emotions, they can't stand them, so they have to shout or hit when they are angry, to stop feeling angry, etc.

It's been a pleasure to have the opportunity to write it This paragraph contains a point that I've seen circulating many times and it ventures into the dangerous territory of gender wars. I know you well enough to know that you don't do this intentionally and I know myself well enough to recognize that I'm sensitive to this. With this disclaimer laid up front, let me make my point. When it comes to the oppressor vs the victim, there is a distinction to be made here. There is abuse where things are clear cut, like the slave owner vs the slave, or parents vs children, or China's Uighur reeducation camps. In these instances, the abuser holds power over the victim's life and exercises it to mutilate their spirit. From the POV of the abuser, the purpose is to "teach" them the "healthy" way of living so that victims would "fit in" with the oppressor. In effect, this kind of abuse is about making the other person into a psychological crutch that serves to fill the gaps in the oppressor's psyche. I will repeat myself here, this is clearly a very misguided and deluded way of trying to "heal" oneself on the part of the oppressor. It is so twisted and warped precisely because it is a defense mechanism on their part - it is not conscious, reflected and deliberate. No human would do this with full clarity and understanding of the repercussions. Oppressors can only do this because they themselves have no concept of personal boundaries. This concept is a huge step in the process of healing because people are only able to hold boundaries when they recognize that there is something precious within them. "Hold" is highlighted because this is distinct from being defensive, or offensive with respect to boundaries. The moment the person is able to recognize their own inherent value, they simultaneously recognize the value of all others. A person that can truly appreciate boundaries, also appreciates the boundaries of others and understands that they are the precondition of all personal freedom that we all deeply seek. Abuser does not understand this, narcissists never learned their own value so they expand their boundaries indefinitely, having no regard for others. There also are the imploded victims that are always okay with whatever happens without understanding their buried anger. This boundary-less condition is what causes enmeshment trauma. Families in which abuse happens, create children with no understanding of their inherent value. This is where the other kind of abuse happens, with no clear distinction between the abuser and the abused. When two adults of equal power meet, and neither of them understands the concept of personal boundaries, abuse is imminent. This is the so-called toxic relationship and where this ventures into the territory of gender wars. In abusive relationships, the victim and the oppressor swap places in different contexts. Calling one a victim and the other an oppressor is adding fuel to the fire, because both of them fulfill both roles. They are also victims of their own parents, usually with no understanding of this fact. It is not at all clear "who started it" because both partners were attracted to each other, symmetrically. A healthy person that understands the value of boundaries would not be attracted to a person that abuses them. It is normal and healthy to postpone having sex in the early stages of relationships and screen for red flags in the other person to see if they understand what it means to be human. As an example in the political context, I could use these to illustrate my point: the first kind of abuse is China vs Tibet, or Nazis vs Jews the second kind of abuse is the cold war, or Israel vs Palestine. I am not a political expert, but this sounds about right to me. I agree that when there is a clear line between the abuser and the victim, like in the first paragraph, external intervention may have a positive effect. Recognizing who is the abuser is helpful to both and isolating him/her to prevent further damage is crucial. In the other example, calling one an abuser and the other the victim is the injustice itself. Seeing the difference between the two cases takes wisdom that is rarely seen in the judicial system. Usually, women are automatically labeled victims and men are automatically labeled as the oppressors. Punishing either one is a crime on the part of the judge because it sends them off further into the spiral of abuse. The right way of getting out of this problem is to make them both see that they are both creating this spiral. This is immensely difficult because it requires coordinated effort and a deliberate decision to trust (to assume good intentions of the other).

Fair enough. I have observed this connection between victimhood, trauma and gaslighting within me, the family I've been raised in, my wife, her family and how it impacts our marriage. I may have overgeneralized it to other kinds of abuse.

You don't want a discussion. You want a hug.

Giving gaslighting a label and talking about it gives the impression that it is a deliberate action taken by the other person to achieve some goal, win a discussion, or assume power. Gaslighting is a defense mechanism. It is a mechanism buried underneath conscious experience that guards the person that "does" gaslighting to you. The goal of denying the reality of the other person (gaslighting) is primarily to prevent oneself from acknowledging something too difficult to acknowledge. It happens when the conversation is touching upon a subject that would probably shake the whole worldview of the gaslighter, sometimes uncovering things within him/herself that have been denied because of self-preservation. For example, people that have been traumatized, routinely gaslight others to steer the conversation away from topics that are too difficult to handle. I strongly believe that all of the so-called narcissists are very deeply traumatized, to the point of being reduced to basic survival instincts. No conversation that brings gaslighting to light will ever be acknowledged by them unless we acknowledge the fact that they are using it to guard themselves from their own hurt. The other issue is about the distinction between being a victim and having a victim mindset. Being a victim is characterized by being hurt, physically or emotionally. It is about damage and wounds that have been inflicted, not about retribution, vengeance, or even justice. If you have been hurt, and are hurting, then you are a victim. Physiologically, victimization is about bruises, broken bones and blood. Psychologically, victimization is about trauma. These two are interrelated, but there is just one thing that leads out of being a victim and it is healing. Healing is distinct from justice, revenge or retribution. Breaking the oppressor's arm does not help to mend yours, neither does traumatizing him help to heal your trauma. Retribution, revenge and justice are ways in which a person with a victim mindset seeks to advance his or her cause. A person is said to have a victim mindset, when being an actual victim has been incorporated into the self-image and a survival mechanism has grown around it. The purpose of the survival mechanism (mechanism=unconscious process) of a person with a victim mindset is to divert attention away noticing the actual damage that needs healing. It is primarily done via gaslighting, projection and denial. This trauma-blindness often causes trauma victims to repeat the traumatic experience by not taking necessary precautions. For example, a woman that is physically abused may repeatedly enter relationships with men that abuse her. Please note that abusers are usually traumatized victims themselves. There is no way out of these cycles other than processing one's psychological trauma. Changing partners will not help. Solitude will help only to the extent that external abuse will stop, but other self-harming mechanisms will arise. Processing trauma is done via accepting the traumatized parts into conscious experience, renouncing the denial, seeing with clarity, spending time with psychological wounds. To make it clear, in all of this I am not excusing abuse. The stable cycles of abuse are a mutual tragedy that is apparent only to the outsiders and understood only in relation to one's own trauma and shadows. One cannot see past the depth of one's own healing. Our parents will not understand their abuse towards us because they did not process how their parents abused them. In some sense, their job is twice as difficult because not only they have been abused and have to live through that pain, but also they have abused us and they genuinely love us. This is why very few people go through this process. Ultimately, we cannot control the behavior of other people and telling them that they abuse us will not make them stop. In my experience calling people out for "their" bullshit in a heated argument helps rarely, if ever. it usually only heats the discussion up even more, so the correct way of doing these things is to talk about what you, personally, feel. "I feel personally attacked" is worlds apart from "you are attacking me personally". If the other person cannot make space for the expression of how you feel, and tries to tell you that you should feel something else, then disengage immediately. It is a sign that they have no respect for who you are and are not interested in what you have to say. It's okay if it happens from time to time, but if it is a common occurrence, then it is a HUGE red flag for a relationship.

@seeking_brilliance Thank you very much ? I don't think I will be able to make enough space for your treat today, but I will post back as soon as I'm able to. I will probably watch it tomorrow.

Randomness is a way of thinking about uncertainty. It does not occur in reality.

I do. The previous job paid well enough, but I hit the ceiling and I was fed up with work environment. I was passionate about programming for many years but my self esteem didn't allow me transition it into a profession. Glad that it turned out this way. A year later I earn twice as much as before and are treated as a human being, so definitely turned out as a plus. Still, it's a job that I do until I heal and then will transition to something more beneficial.

There is no purpose to human life other than the one chosen by the individual. We're here to express our uniqueness regardless of the relative development level. Actually, it does not get any easier to do so at the higher spiral stages because responsibility is greater. I agree with @Jennjenn, trauma is one of the most significant factors that stunts growth.

Every moderator is green here lmao

I'm hesitant to post this because I'm not sure myself what to think about it. Usually, when talking about minorities, I avoid the argument that it's the minority's responsibility to assimilate into the culture. However, with SD, I'm tempted to use this argument and claim that it's Green's responsibility to fit in with the other stages. I think so because healthy green should have gone through all the other stages and be able to understand where they are coming from and connect with them at their level of development. I may be conflating Green with Yellow here, but this line of thinking may be beneficial if adopted. I also don't think that the usual minority oppression talk is applicable in this instance because of the difference in cognitive abilities and self-understanding between Green and lower stages. Integrated Green would run circles around Blue in conversation. So I don't think that Green needs much protection when confronted with prior tiers. Remember that the higher one is up the spiral, the easier it is to accumulate wealth an power, so the dynamic here is reversed compared to usual minority oppression talk.

While I appreciate the shout-out, it ain't gonna happen. Demonizing is not a deliberate choice for tier 1 spiral stages, so asking the favor explicitly is not going to stop it.

Used to build molds for thermoplastic injection. Now I'm a programmer working in cryptocurrency field.

Never saw new mods introduced before. Talking about moderation policies openly is a good policy.

Using the forum interactions to feel validated, seen. Have a tendency of repeating and re-formulating my point over and over again if I don't feel like it has been acknowledged or understood My points tend to be abstract and I sometimes can drop a witty non dual one-liner just to confuse people Getting into inner contest with other advisors and comparing myself to them (Mandy, Nahm) Not nearly as humorous as I'd like to be Too much concern about my profile and journal statistics These will improve over time when I heal my traumas. I am deliberately not writing about using the forum too much because it is not a problem with the forum perse, but a problem with the current structure of my life.

Glad to hear that <3

Another radical idea: mandatory therapy before claiming any public office. Therapists being apolitical is the trick.

For the past week I've been grieving. Not able to gush out any creative energy at work, just barely making it through, crying in my car on my way back home. Honestly, the pain I'm connecting with is so deep within me that I basically thought that it is me. I am able to cry it out for the first time in my life.

In this this thread: "my enlightenment is more enlightened than your enlightenment".

The reason many religions have such weird taboos surrounding naming God is because turning "it" into a concept gives the illusion that God can be understood intellectually. Once you experience it, it is actually very difficult to ask meaningful questions about "it". In abstract terms, God is a tautology, so giving it a name that is distinct from all other words is misleading. Hence, it is sometimes called AUM, which is the sound that is present in all words as a basis for modification.

I think that spiritual discussions would be much more entertaining if we activated a filter that changes "God" to... [enter profanity of your choice]

Very interesting. Watching his current state, I would have never guessed that he went through such a long path. He even touched green for some time. I wonder what happened.

I was never touched with affection by my father. Thinking of images where I'm hugged by another man puts me in the right place for crying.