Political Power Health and Safety Check required, immediately.

 

Milosovic

 

Blair

 

The Vatican

These three images are just a hint at the dynamic of how insitutional power is reflexively defensive of it's position and manages harms that are exposed in ways that ensure they remain in power. The individuals at the top have usually internalised that power, and identify with that rather than the people over whom they have that power.

Loss of empathy is inherent. Hubris is common. Arrogance is the norm.

Established Power needs to be submitted to a full health and safety check, by the people.

That is pure common sense logic. However, there is a problem….. we have a problem.

Institutions, power and honesty.

“School tends to be a dishonest as well as a nervous place. We adults are not often honest with children, least of all in school. We tell them, not what we think, but what we feel they ought to think; or what other people feel or tell us they ought to think.

The fact is that we (the adult world) do not feel an obligation to be truthful to children.

We are like managers and manipulators of news in Washington, Moscow, London, Peking and Paris and all the other capitals of the world.

We think it is our right and our duty, not to tell the truth but to say whatever will best serve our cause – in this case, the cause of making children grow up into the kind of people we want them to be, thinking whatever we want them to think.

We have only to convince ourselves (and we are very easily convinced) that a lie will be ‘better’ for the children than the truth, and we will lie. We don’t always need even that excuse; we often lie only for our own convenience.”

Written in 1964, by John Holt who had thousands of hours of observation of children in schools across America. He wrote a few superb books on children and learning, and energised the homeschooling/unschooling movement in the USA.

How much does this insight resonate today, in 2017, in the UK?

Institutions are power centres.

Schools are also power centres.

It’s where we learn how to behave within an institutionalised power hierarchy.

‘No child left behind.’

Power Centres will always reflexively seek to defend that Power. Those who hold high office will often internalise that value completely. To the exclusion of healthy common sense and empathy, to a psychologically unstable degree.

There are examples in every area of society – Religion: the Vatican and Pedophilia – Politics, War and indoctrination : HiIlsborough, Chilcott, Levenson I – Health and Safety : Amoco Cadiz, Bhopal, Flint Water Supply, Fracking. Can you begin to see the pattern of behaviours?

There are plenty of examples in schools where matters of abuse or negligence or bias have been hushed up.

There are plenty of schools where teachers have been ‘convinced’ to support the diagnosis of ADHD and the subsequent drugging of children as a class room management strategy, etc etc - (more than my job/income, food, shelter, family is worth to challenge this is understandable, the teacher is being bullied institutionally and knows not to irk the masters).

And, in all of this activity, in so many areas of civic and commercial insitutional culture we see minor officials, lower ranks coerced to comply with the instructions of the powerful, to defend the institution rather than acknowledge the harms and be exposed. Iraq.

This is an easily identified pattern, with a massive evidence base that is quite reliable.

Established Power will use its power to protect itself.

The People are not to challenge that.

We see the powerful hire the best and most expensive legal teams to oppose ordinary people with relatively little comparative power, where the battle is one of financial resources, with one side far wealthier than the other….

We see out of court settlements.  “It could take years, take the offer!”

We do not see the full evidence.

We do not see justice.

Fines.

No criminal indictments.

The powerful will defend their position of power at all costs.

That is why Public Inquiries have failed to deliver Justice.

Power Hierarchies impose pressure to perform downwards, upon all subordinates, and failure to follow instructions by higher ranking personnel leading to loss of job for the lower ranking personnel is one of those intentional pressures.

Even when an order or instruction is illegal, amoral, destructive, negligent or corrupt, that pressure remains a potent leverage in today’s public and private Institutions. Who wants to be a whistle blower? Who would brave that storm?

Cover ups and mitigations do happen, and never by accident.

Political, economic, ideological and religious power demands that the holder be a bully, and bullies are more attracted to power than those who are not bullies.

The bully who is driven by the institutional environment to be more effective becomes professionalised. Fully committed.

That degree of committment to gaining and holding power is a social problem, a root dysfunction, a foundational malady.

Only when power is taken up as a shared responsibility of the grass roots tax payers, the people who both fund and who work in Civil Society will we have a safe, honest social political system.

Those who hold too much power will not yield it willingly.

Teresa May is demonstrating that right now. She is for the bullies. She backs Trumps call for Air Strikes against Syria, whilst the nation reels from a horror the Government (New Labour, Tory and Lib-Dem) created in Grenfell Towers. Air Strikes against urban areas with social housing..........

What does that really mean?

I am also talking about the culture at the lowest ranks in the hierarchies of power.. how debilitating and threatening the presence of poverty and disdain is, how corrosive it is.

There are many people who will seek to defend their bias, internalise their opinion as fact, deny the evidence, mitigate the responsibility at all levels.

I am interested in the psychological experiential root, rather than then violence itself, and I want to understand how that afflicts us all, and how do we recover from that, to what degree is recovery possible in the current environment?

We here at the grass roots must work for our own recovery as part of the resolution.

We also have to organise and protect our civil society, administer our shared resources with wisdom and enhance the environment of our community.

We cannot wait for the Established Power to awaken, to come to it’s senses, to re-humanise, to recover.

We must get on with it.

If we do, and I think many of us are, and more are joining in every day, then perhaps it is more likely that Established Power can be submitted to a full health and safety check by the people.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Patterns: Institutional defence systems vs the truth : Child Sexual Abuse

Institutional response to Child Sexual Abuse as a culture.
Note: there are a number of inquiries ongoing across the Earth, in different countries and continents, at different stages of development. These inquiries are largely focussed on the ways institutions within which egregious harming criminal actions were perpetrated have sought to respond to the exposure of these crimes.


More are planned.


For many decades we the people have been,if we were paying attention,  hearing evidence and life stories from survivors of child abuse, narratives of harms and assaults that were perpetrated by abusers who found positions of power and within these institutions, which gave them access because of the setting, in schools, reformatories, residential premises.

The predators understood the value of the status and the public trust afforded once they were part of the institution, embedded; these institutions would by their very nature seek to protect their image, status and access to kudos and wealth. The abusers would understand this.

That strategy of protection is played out right before us, in the 21^st Century.

It’s tactics are the stuff of courtrooms, banking, civilian police, media, settlement, intimidation, cover-up, and worse, the practice of protecting the abusers, moving them around large countries, or across continents, and when more assaults are made, the whole process starts again, with  an adversarial response from the Institution, mandating a rapid cash settlement, admitting no responsibility and a confidentiality contract. Thwarting Civil Criminal due process. Subverting the course of Justice....

There are a few common threads, patterns of behaviour to be observed in how Institutions across the world respondeda, throughout these decades of witness testimony, those with prima facie evidence, and whose evidence was corroborated and accepted in court as true, leading to indictments, prison sentences, pay outs, settlements, regulations, exposure.

The primary response appears to be to determine how best to manage what they see as a crisis first and foremost of the Institution itself.

This concern dominates the strategic and tactical arena of politicised clergy, or institutional officers, senior management, executives and leaders.

Tactics range from denial, to settlement, to intimidation, to adversarial court practices, setting Survivors who retain their trust in the system against others who do not hold that trust, for whom that is not an issue, yet whose access to support is filtered by that ‘flaw’.

Inadequate funding of healing services, care services set up to fail, through applying pressure across a range of activities, from funding to counselling, to legal advice, all loyal to The Church, and though they do use the lunch PR to advertise their good work…. The truth is that Charity by Institutions is part of their PR campaign.

A large budget is devoted to lobbying. The ultimate intent of that lobbying is to avoid the most necessary single action.

Total transparency. All their files.

News Media campaigns. The Good They Do.

Internal Inquiries.

‘Independent’ Internal Investigations.

Recommendations.

NO CONVICTIONS.

no indictments.

Settlements.

And

No matter how public the evidence becomes, the Institutional mind set will hold onto it’s power until the bitter end.

Because it is the Power, the exercise of power, the feeling of that, that psychology at it’s experiential base that Institutions and Bureaucracies can amplify; that is the Raison D’Etre of the Institution. The ‘service provided’ is both the medium through which power can be projected, and a decoy sweetener, social grooming.

So when more and more witness testimony comes forward, as it is, as it will as Survivors feel more encouraged that most people will support them, remember this.

Yes, the abusers committed the first crime; and the institution was an accessory after the fact on everything that flowed from that failure to protect the child because the status of the institution was primary in their concerns.

The institutional crimes are Wilful Negligence, Corporate Murder, Corporate Torture, Obstruction of Justice just to identify the most obvious……

So too when we hear that allegations were made, some upheld, many settled, privately and see that nothing in the way of preventative measures were taken when it was understood to be a common enough culture of exploitation of young vulnerable people in their care, and that we are to accept that behaviour by the standards of those times ….. tell ‘em to piss right off!

Gerroutahere!

The Correct Thing for The Institutions To Do is hand over all the data, evidence, paper work, ect of all known proven cases and allegations recorded within their sphere of influence, locally, nationally, internationally to UN mandated Public Judicial Inquiries, and let Justice be done, transparently.

Logically.

Obvious when it’s clearly outlined, innit!?

That is all they NEED to do, to support genuine Justice, to demonstrate they are indeed, followers of Christ.

They need do nothing else; well,  apart from rapidly prepare to divest much of their institutional wealth in reparations, to meet the civil costs bills...

On my list are all of the following, no order implied;  all should be fully televised.

They ought also be regulated away from any and all political activism, or influence over Governance as a public service, a professional public service, serving all. Equally. No Church more lobbying.

And they must accept criminal responsibility for all egregious actions that caused harms, according to standard criminal and civil tarrifs.

Prostrate in utter Humility before A statue of The Virgin Mary and Infant.

Become the essence of Christ and no other. No Old Testament. Chuck it out. It’s drivel. Sermon on the mount and all child and person friendly aphorisms…. that's as far as it goes.

Return all the wealth and land they stole from Native Peoples.

Have all their gold cloth and braiding recycled as clothes for refugees, homeless people, etc.  VAT free of course!

Remove the crucifixion from the story. It’s the words and actions as a healthy humane person that matter. The rest is all a distraction. Miracles? Hah. They happen all the time, anyways.

Redesign Churches as Community Centers, for everyone.

Cease claiming the Pope has a special line with God.

Not much to ask for in return for retaining the base of the institution, without all the corrupt trappings. given all that they have done - I’d call that a free pass of sorts.

End all forms of indoctrination.

That might be pushing it a bit.

Quakerise it.

Over the top!"

All of that we'd leave out, if ye'd just be honest and out yer hands up, and be done with it. That's what concerns most Survivors. The honest accounting, before the full public. The truth.

Simply put.

But no.

The FA will not do that. The Vatican will not do that. The Church of England will not do that. The BBC did not do that. Then there’s Cyril Smith. And …. And …. And… Public Judicial Inquiries on three or four continents. Massive world wide web of connected offending within Internationalised Institutions.

The Globalisation of Abuse.

The power and the money required to achieve all that.

That is what Survivors are standing up to.

The Institutions do not want to let go of that power and wealth.

For them “Power Matters, (your lives don’t.)”

It is a statement.

The Institution is the excuse to wield the power, and it is the power that is the primary addiction. It afflicts us all, high and low, and it is amplified when bad people gain access to the power of Institutions.

They were designed that way.

Economics as a weapon of conquest, as developed within the East India Company,  for example, over the course of 150 years.

Following on from previous experiments, they included Christianity as part of the myth of British goodness, alongside commerce and civilisation.

That was what the papers wrote. Fake News.

The BBC will not make itself transparently accountable.

That is pretty rough playing.

And more witness testimony emerges. More real news.

In the 1990s, it Ireland it was the Irish Swimming Sport; this week it’s Olympic Swimming in the USA.

Each new wave is a mountainous wave of heart-break, soul death, terror, confusion, anger, rage, shame, guilt, loneliness, despair and then resilience, for some, and the sheer courage it takes to stand up to these huge Institutions.

How strong are these Survivors?

How much do we owe them, really?

Is this not critical information about our societal power structures, beyond opinion, we are talking about evidenced stuff here. They did that. It did happen.

And the honest accounting of all this cannot be set aside so easily, nor, sad to say, is it likely to be easily attained.

It is there.

FAKE NEWS DEFINED!

Fake news is basically all the narratives that support these states of denial, either by ignoring, denying, pretending, distraction, scapegoating, whatever!!

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

Bullying Behaviours, Corbyn, the grass roots, the media and The Establishment.

Does any of these behaviours ring a bell, with regards to Corbyn, EUref, the abuse on all sides, the behaviour of Media and Politicians in general??

Here are some recognisable bullying traits and tactics, designed to damage, isolate, discredit and eliminate the target:

#Bullies are adept at exploiting the trust and needs of individuals, organisations and groups, for personal gain.

 

#Bullies react to criticism with denial, retaliation, feigned victimhood.

 

The #Bully grooms bystanders, and the target, to believe the target deserves the treatment they are receiving and attempts to limit contact between others and their target.

Often the #Bully will use communications that exclude the target so that there is no opportunity for them to defend themselves and present their truth.

 

The #Bystanders see only the Dr Jekyll side of the bully, but only the target sees the Mr/Ms Hyde side; Dr Jekyll is sweet, manipulative and charming, Mr/Ms Hyde is evil; Mr/Ms Hyde is the real person, Dr Jekyll is an act.

 

#Bullies exert power and control by a combination of selectively withholding information and spreading lies and disinformation, therefore everyone has a distorted picture – of only what the bully wants them to see.

 

The #Target finds that in any response, everything they say and do is twisted, distorted and misrepresented.

 

#Bullies are adept at manipulating people’s perceptions with intent to engender a negative view of the target in the minds of others – this is achieved through undermining and discrediting, including the creation of doubts and suspicions and the sharing of lies.

 

#Bullies use other people to further the aim of discrediting their target, creating a false impression of consensus.

 

#Bullies poison the atmosphere and actively poison people’s minds against the target when close to being outwitted and exposed, the bully feigns victimhood and turns the focus on themselves as previously stated – another example of manipulating people through their emotions such as guilt, sympathy, feeling sorry for the bully.

Many #Bystanders are hoodwinked by the bully’s ruses for abdicating responsibility and evading accountability, they may say, for example: “that’s all in the past”, “let’s focus on the future” , “you need to make a fresh start”, and “forgive and forget”, “you’ve got to move on”, “sticks and stones” and so on.

 

#Bystanders often feel cognitive dissonance and usually minimise their discomfort by reasoning to avoid any responsibility, it usually goes this way because they themselves don’t want to become targets. They may say things like: “just ignore them”, “stand up to them” , “I’ve personally never had any problems with him/her”, “Oh I never get involved in personal differences” and so on. Even worse, they may imply that you did something wrong to “attract” the bullying.

 

The #Bully encourages and manipulates as many bystanders as possible to lie, act dishonorably and dishonestly, withhold information and spread lies and misinformation, the bully manipulates bystanders to punish the target for alleged infractions, so the bystanders also become instruments of harassment.

 

Some people gain gratification (a perverse feeling of satisfaction) from seeing others in distress and thus become complicit in the bullying and a few people think that #bullying is funny.

source: Kitty Jones

Look back over the campaigns, news articles, briefings and with all of the above in mind, examine the patterns and identify the people invovled.

Learn to spot these tactics, and learn how to thwart them.

It's long past the time we dealt with the Public School Boy ethic of Power in Governance and the Corporate world.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

Patterns. Behavioural patterning.

Patterns. Behavioural patterning.

As a general pattern, a commonly held view, according to conventional wisdom, and a view that accords with the beliefs of Religionists,  Ideologues, the NeoLiberal right wing and bullies of all kinds through out society is that 'survival of the fittest' is a fundamental justification of their position because it is a scientific fact which they claim is to be seen every day in nature.

Animals brutally eating other animals.

"It is the way the world works!"

They tend to refuse to address the evidence that suggests otherwise, a data base that is already vast, and which happens to be mounting in detail every day.

Which is that all organisms eat, all are eaten, all shit and piss and all the shit and piss and decay is food for more life and more diversity and it’s all sitting on the hard work of bacteria.

The bigger picture.

The bigger picture is that all this activity nurtures more life, in ever increasing diversity, and to the human eye, great beauty and generosity.

Biology is a living process of co-operation across space and time, a web of mutually nurturant processes mediated by geology, climate the action of the organisms themselves and not much else besides.

Animal Predation is the basis for human predation, therefore Human predation is natural.

Which is akin to asserting that Moles are the same as Miners, and calling that the same behavioural dynamic.

The comparison between carnivore predator and predatory human pathology holds no water. In logic terms it is a faulty comparison.

We cannot gain any accurate information by comparing the optimal health of one organism in it’s natural environment with the adverse health of another organism in a chronically stressed environment.. That does not compute.

Its like saying that a boot and a hole in the mud are the same thing because one can put one's foot in both - but they are not the same thing. They do share some qualities.

Human predatory behaviour is psychopathy and it cannot be compared to any normal healthy animal behaviour.

Human predatory behaviour  does not emerge and persist as much in healthy families, healthy communities, healthy societies as it does in hierarchically violent cultures - there is vast evidence of this, and a very detailed picture of what happens when an egalitarian pre-conquest culture is intruded upon by a bully predatory culture, the effects of chronic stress emerge within one generation.

That process is an mirror of what happens to an individual who goes through chronic stress and trauma at any stage of life... and is broken by it.

And therefore it is not a valid comparison with healthy normal behaviour in another organism.

Evolution and convention.

I see 'evolution differently to the way the mainstream sees it.

I don't subscribe to the linear process of a -z where a is 'primitive' and z is 'perfected'. I am completely evolved right here right now. I might be traumatised, scarred, limping, mentally distressed, inadequate - most of these are symptoms of environmental conditions where the biological mandate for optimal health is degraded. I need healing more than evolving.

I see a web of experience where each adaptation is complete at all times, always has been and always will be, as long as a habitat for life exists : indeed that is what current science of micro and macro biology is clarifying.

Rather than evolution from primitive to perfected, it is a process of ever increasing density of nurturant processes mediated by a diverse range of organisms that from the get go are responsive to changes in the dynamic habitat mediated by geology, weather, asteroids, and even man made changes ... etc....

Life is. Complete. This is how I feel my own being and when I look at people I see the same, and if there are changes I might want to help, they'd be about healing behaviour rather than 'evolving it'. Very much in the present, the here and now. This has been my experience in this field.

I suspect the linear progression view is partly Empire Logic, a stream of hierarchical thinking which all supports the assumption that the Empire is the most best top Gods chosen one and all the past has lead to this glorious moment.

The concept of Heaven was and remains a mental hopium to facilitate 'working for the man' until you died.

The experience of constant power struggles of the violent hierarchies in this culture is the basis for that particular concept of linear progression and survival of the fittest.

Amongst older, wiser, gentler and cultures, that thrived for 60,000 + years, and many younger ones that are still in existence, on the edges (350,000,000 people world wide) of 'civilisation' the pattern is to experience time as a web, that operates 360 degrees from any single point. and they feel their place as part of the earths living body.

And THAT feeling is 100% correct. They are. That feeling is the full body mind sensory experience which exists before the words of connection, bonding, intimacy, nurture are uttered. Experience is meaning, words is communication.

The example of societies that live and have lived lives that were and are loving, nurturing, bonded, religion free, hierarchy free, sexually healthy, egailtarian, co-operative and within that human, vulnerable, open to being hurt, capable of anger, pain, fear, terror, despair, mood swings....

I don't have a rose tinted view of pre-conquest life.

I do recognise healthy nurturing humane relationships, and I see these as the most important area of human experience and meaning of life, above all other considerations.

This human body and mind is perfectly evolved to love, to experience happiness and content, to be robust in health, to contribute to the community that nurtures me because it's joyful, it is gratitude.. it is evolved to be able to deal with occasional moments of stress, accidents, difficulties, emergencies - it is not evolved to be able to handle long term chronic stress and unresolved trauma. The proof of that is the way degenerative diseases increase in chronically stressed populations.

That is the big picture of the known existence of Hominoids as understood an Anthropology at the cutting edge, from all that I am accessing via information flows world wide, from solid science to the stories of peoples lives.

"What happened before the trauma?"

A pertinent question.

My thoughts are this...

What was the child doing, engaged in, feeling right before the adult shouted violently at the child?

- The child was exploring a sharp tool. or. The child spilled a glass of milk whilst learning how to hold the class..

What change occurred in the child's sense of self?

- Shock, then fear, all focus on the adult, then incomprehension, then tears ..... both the tool and the milk and what happened just before the shock are gone from the child's mind... and the child's attention is now fixated on the adult to prepare for what ever happens next.... to meet the adults needs to avoid further pain.

The rubber plant was growing well in that spot. Fresh shoots were a constant. Then someone dropped a bottle of tequila into the pot. And the rubber plant died.

Any healthy organism or community of organism will develop stress behaviours if exposed to long term trauma and re-traumatisation, or chronic stress.

As part if my healing, I had to access who I was before the abuse, what was I doing?

And for me what I found was a lovely wee baby boy, absolutely excited about life, exploring, growing, and that there was immense personal pleasure in the sensory experience of being alive.

Throw that baby into elite Irish catholic boarding schools, give him a good whipping, maintain that pressure for 12 years, and see how he will turn out... each child is different, so the bullies have to subject lots of children to the process and filter out the ones who will work for the system, and the ones who will not, and then break that lot if they can.

Ruling systems are experts at recruitment via grooming, indoctrination, manipulation, bureaucracy to 'manage' vulnerable, damaged people, to avoid what damages them that they are responsible for, to create grass roots division, and the are adept at gas-lighting, social torture, etc - they have already seen it all, studied it... Machiavelli.. The Bible.

I emerged from those 12 years a behavioural bully. I was one of the ones who was broken. I was manipulative, dishonest, insecure, paranoid, charming if need be, masking low self esteem... not acknowledging the pain of those I hurt. And a head full of quite crazy ludid paranoia's and self harm daydreams....

I also thought that all my behavioural problems were all about me, that my childhood had been more or less normal, that it was ALL me, that I was what was 'wrong'....

I was not born to be that way. I was not wombed to be that way. No one is, ever.

So in answer, there is plenty of evidence of widespread native cultures of diverse language groups and societies that were fundamentally egalitarian and biodynamically sustainable, and it tips towards being the dominant mode of human society for the 3 million years of human existence.

It is the confirmation from the recent discoveries in endocrinology, neurology, epi-genetics, and the exploration of bacterial life within the body are all reliable as indicators of health and stress over time, vast spans of time even though we are left with less and less materials, surviving artefacts, bones etc to assert the reliability of that assumption as we go back further and further in time: the body systems are ancient and they carry that ancient thread within them. The bacteria many of them are older still.

That evidence still exists where much of the material has vanished.

How do children become bullies and psychopaths?

A friend asked "How do children become bullies or psychopaths?" in relation to my assertion that human relationships, and thus the societies of human beings, were pretty much egalitarian for the bulk of our existence. His point was that healthy people would not allow bullying to go unchallenged. How does it start?

From what I have learned, it can be at a whole range of starting points.... .... they can be extremely subtle …and over time if slights are not resolved, if misunderstandings are repeated, they can fester, even if the child appears to be unconscious of them. That is internal pressure.

Which leads to more misunderstanding of the children's behaviour if they try to communicate and are not really heard, and so their needs are not met, and they become frustrated, and this leads on to more control, more demands for compliance, less negotiation by the parents, school, carers etc further compounding the issue.. and then there's aspects of that child's own person, autonomy, style of being, the food they eat, what colours they like,who they think they are, all these at the specific level of the individual are absolutely vital to pick out in diagnosis, or rather understanding the picture of that child's life.

That child might grow up and fit in, be fairly kind, normal and be a bit controlling, and at any stage a situation can trigger the old issues into bullying, a little at first, and so on... and he or she will tend to hang out with others he or she feels on par with.

If they build a social structure they will inject their psychology into it. If they have children, the children will grow up with that as normality. They will justify it all the way, and over time create stories or myths to support that justification. That children who grow up into a Islamic world become identify as Islamic is not a coincidence. What else was on offer? Who can blame them for that?

Extrapolate that kind of understandable mix up within a stressing social system out across whole populations, over thousands of years.... and suddenly European History makes horrific sense...

"Given the kind of society and family you were born into, how you have been treated and related to, and all that you have experienced, it's no wonder you feel the way you do!"

The precise diagnostic for that individual, if you will, but in practice more of a process of self discovery by the patient in a safe and empathic environment, than the prescriptions of some licenced professional pointing it out and administering 'medications'.

Not everyone will follow that path into compliance, broken-ness. (the processes of 'social engineering' are not perfected, nor will they ever be. We humans are way too diverse, and we are inherently free exploratory beings designed to thrive. THAT cannot be erased.) Not all abused become abusers.

The data we have at present is suggestive of a dynamic where the vast majority of serious abusers were abused as children or suffered later intense trauma and at either stage they surrendered.

This evidence cannot be used to excuse harm caused, or mitigate how we deal with those who cause serious, serious harm, and show no real remorse, Some people are genuinely dangerous and cannot be allowed to participate in open society.

Ever. As a health and safety issue, not as punishment.

It all comes down to what is a truly healthy relationship between adults and children, and what does our biology and experience of the last 250,000 years tell us about the most fertile, nurturant, loving, respectful  and sustainable ways to life on Earth and where does that correlate with the physical, emotional, social and psychological quality of people's experience of life and relationship?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

The Dysfunctional Family and the kind of politics of Power I abhor.

I have often written that the dominant structures of political, economic and religious power seem to behave in patterns that are similar to a dysfunctional family within which abuse occurs.

A thought experiment  on Political Role Play: Can you identify Politicians and sectors of the electorate who demonstrate any of these behaviours?

Pick a descriptive sentence from the list below, preface it with a politician, and a link to a story or comment they have made that reveals the behaviour pattern.

• "Using" (destructively narcissistic parents who rule by fear and conditional love)

• Abusing (parents who use physical violence, or emotionally, or sexually abuse their children)

• Perfectionist (fixating on order, prestige, power, and/or perfect appearances, while preventing their child from failing at anything)

• Dogmatic or cult-like (harsh and inflexible discipline, with children not allowed, within reason, to dissent, question authority, or develop their own value system)

• Inequitable parenting (going to extremes for one child while continually ignoring the needs of another)

• Deprivation (control or neglect by withholding love, support, necessities, sympathy, praise, attention, encouragement, supervision, or otherwise putting their children's well-being at risk)

• Abuse among siblings (parents fail to intervene when a sibling physically or sexually abuses another sibling)

• Abandonment (a parent who willfully separates from their children, not wishing any further contact, and in some cases without locating alternative, long-term parenting arrangements, leaving them as orphans)

• Appeasement (parents who reward bad behavior—even by their own standards—and inevitability punish another child's good behavior in order to maintain the peace and avoid temper tantrums "Peace at any price")

• Loyalty manipulation (giving unearned rewards and lavish attention trying to ensure a favored, yet rebellious child will be the one most loyal and well-behaved, while subtly ignoring the wants and needs of their most loyal child currently)

• "Helicopter parenting" (parents who micro-manage their children's lives and/or relationships among siblings—especially minor conflicts)

• "The deceivers" (well-regarded parents in the community, likely to be involved in some charitable/non-profit works, who abuse or mistreat one or more of their children)

• "Public image manager" (sometimes related to above, children warned to not disclose what fights, abuse, or damage happens at home, or face severe punishment "Don't tell anyone what goes on in this family")

• "The paranoid parent" (a parent having persistent and irrational fear accompanied by anger and false accusations that their child is up to no good or others are plotting harm)

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

What happens in the womb is a predictor of many patterns in adulthood.

Here's a short talk on the profound affects of our experience in utero, at birth and in early infancy.....

http://www.fromwombtoworld.com/

I was conceived by two parents who had a variety of serious issues emanating from their own experiences. My mother had MS, had lost 4 children before I was born. I was born premature by one month, by caesarian birth. I spent 6 weeks in an incubator.

I know my mother loved me. I know she was very stressed. My father was an alcoholic.

The experiences I lived through did set up patterns that I was able to fully acknowledge only in my late 30's.

My own child was wanted by both her mother and father. She was born at home, supported by midwives and her mother used a birth pool. At the time we both loved each other, even though we had our issues. Her mother had a child, a boy, some 5 years earlier. I became his step-father.

In my relationship with him, my parenting patterns emerged and I managed, eventually, to begin to see these and to deal with some of them over the next four years we were together.

We separated, and though it was difficult at the time, I see now that it was the correct thing to do. I spent the next 12 years slowing working on my own unresolved issues, for my own health and well being.

In fact that work continues, and I don't see an end to that work. Nonetheless over the years I have become more at self empathic and at ease with who I am, and what I lived through, to the extent that I no longer 'blame' those who harmed me because I see their lives in context of what they and their parents went through. I still hold certain people accountable for some of the things they did to me. That is appropriate, I feel, because it helps me to be realistic about certain facts.

The primary fact is this : we are born into a Society we did not create, and in my case, a Hierarchically Violent Society, that mediated Power throughout peoples lives in many adverse ways which they could not counter.

I was born to a well-off Irish  middle class family in 1959. The profound psychologically adverse affects of the Christian concepts related to Original Sin, Sexuality and Obedience to Authority, overlayed with 800 years of intense strife and oppression,with two civil wars and world wars in living memory, do not vanish overnight, nor even in the passage of one generation, 30 years or so. The process of recovery takes time.

There are ways to nurture that process. These resources are ways in which we can, each of us, nurture ourselves and in some ways heal from any adverse experience we may have lived through.

Understanding one's earliest experiences, and where one was born into in an historical timeline - the context of our parents lives, and their parents before them, in the Society there were living in - are important resources in this work. There are many others, and this blog refers to those resources on a  regular basis.

As Stephen Harrod Buhner writes, "It helps if you become your own best friend and find out what is true about all this for yourself."

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe