Maybe a subtitle could be "anti-social personality disorder, revisited." This is an extract from an earlier article i wrote called "Do Sociopaths Deserve Humane Treatment?"
Victim Mentality. The oft cited and rarely defined term that i shall define and cite for you myself.
Definition: blaming the victim for being one.
Citation: those enraged by being
sought out as a target for hate and anger (actively or passively).
Sociopaths are people with an anti-social personality disorder. This, boiled down, means that a group of them cannot form healthy and productive societies because their very behavioral patterns are against the needs of the group and for their own benefit (including when they appear to be socio-conscious in order to appear perfectly normal and respectable).
The very right to be enraged or even hurt at the actions of another make you a bad person in the eyes and minds of the majority.
Example:
If someone walks into the room and denounces your work ethic to a bunch of your co-workers, several times a week, while you're not around to witness it and defend yourself on the spot or call out your accuser to prove his or her statements or back down... you've just been violated. An act of social and psychological violence has been made against you.
"I don't play the victim mentality role. It doesn't matter what people think, just how good a job you do!"
Sorry, but you are just as much a victim as if your boss walked into your office or cubical and pushed a knife into your chest without provocation. Sidelining again, what kind of provocation would justify that response?? Were you socially and psychologically tormenting your boss by spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt among every member of the workplace to the point that your boss was being shunned, joked about, and at risk of losing his life-sustaining income by losing job simply because you felt it was totally harmless to do smart-ass gossiping because you feel intimidated by his work experience?
It matters what people think of you if they control, socially, your accessibility to the pursuit of success, or even happiness.
True Victims do not choose themselves. It is not shameful to be a victim.
Victimizers choose their victims. Most often by way of jealousy and self-esteem issues. They seek those who they feel are not a threat to them. Those they feel they can control or with whom they can control the situation and the perception of events. This is shameful.
True shameful "victim mentality" is justifying your inhumane, cruel and violent actions by saying "
He/she did this-and-that to me, so I am responding in kind. If others get in my way, that's just too bad. It's not like I'm targeting anyone innocent."
True "victim mentality" is "
I'm going to be rude, cold and judgmental to you because that's what everyone has done to me my whole life. Why should I be sensitive to YOU when no one was sensitive to ME??"
THAT, is what shameful "victim mentality" is. Point your fingers, and knives where they belong.
Who's doing the pointing, anyway? In who's best interest might it be to make victimization into something the victim should be
shameful and
held responsible for?
The victimizers. The one's who have control over the situation and over you. Victimizers are the ones who devised the concept that being a victim is "your own damn fault." It's in their best interest that you be "ashamed for
letting it happen to you." As though to defeat rational observation (and discussion) of true cause and effect, they seek to make the effect have no cause but itself.
"You worked with him before, so why would you work for him again if he's so bad??"
Yes, that one is DIRECTLY from my OWN personal experience. The complacent gossipers and the ignorant and naive bystanders trying to cover up the "unbelievable" fact that they have missed something and that they think you want special treatment (or have been getting it). The people who were not (yet) victims of the sociopathic victimizer. The ones who were once victims themselves but failed to escape and chose to find a pariah of their own. Or several. The people who hate you and victimize you for reminding them of how it feels to be victimized.
There are entire cults who rant against the slaughter and immorality of World War II and human slavery. Cult? i don't mean to suggest that the people who find these things objectionable are the cult members; i mean that there are actually people who find it A BOTHER that these things are still discussed and that they must be such a burden since "hey, man, it's not like i killed any jews or had any slaves, so leave me alone."
"Those who forget the past are destined to repeat it" (misquote)
This isn't philosophy. This is concrete reality. This is human behavior on the macro and microscopic level. From the individual to the group mind.
The the most critical concept to understand here is on the macro level: the individual victimizer and his or her victim. The way they propagate by leading one victim after another down the path of becoming victimizer. A victimizer is a much more aggressive person on certain fronts and are much better at holding on to what little they believe is theirs.
The more sociopaths are allowed to shape the world around them to best suit their own interests (not the interests of the group, the society or the species), the more damage they do (to the society) and the more sociopaths they CREATE.
You've heard the rhetoric about what growing up in a war zone, or in prison, or being a child of molestation creates: it creates a replication of the stimuli. The victim becomes hardened from constant assaults. A hostile environment creates a defensive individual. Constant exposure to hostility turns defensiveness into hostility. Hostility acts outwardly against those who appear to be the cause of the hostile environment... or maybe anyone... because "HE didn't stop it from happening" and "SHE didn't tell the boss about the gossip about me."
A hostile and toxic environment creates a hostile and toxic person. It can do nothing else. You either harden or you weaken. Those who weaken are frequently used by other people as a comparison or consolation agent; to ease their own suffering or make it pale in comparison. What better way to make your problems pale in comparison to someone else's than by MAKING someone else's problems worse?
Yes, you may think it's all fun and games. Harmless talk. Chit chat. Gossip. Play. Ribbing.
Play leads to exhaustion. Exhaustion leads to lowered stamina. Lowered stamina leads to sensitivity. Sensitivity leads to vulnerability. Vulnerability leads to being damaged by "lesser offenses." And in the end, you have victimizers, formerly victims, pointing fingers at the lesser victims; the ones they can pick at and NOT be brought to justice.
Human beings exposed to toxic experiences during their developmental stages very often become "rugged" or "tough" as a defensive mechanism. It's automatic part way, but then it also becomes part of the personality. That's when it becomes choice. Many people at this point choose to "take it like a man/woman" and "give as good as they get" ...
.. but on the inside... they're rotting out and becoming a shell of armor which protects a wounded child that never grew up and never learned appropriate and healthy ways of defending or avoiding the toxic and hostile experiences. These people end up with Borderline Personality Disorder.
BPD.
Anyone reading me on a regular basis knows that i struggle with the understanding that those who have abused me have become abusive because they themselves were abused. i empathize with these people because i know suffering well enough. At first, they like this. Later, they feel vulnerable because i see and know too much. Then i become a threat. To their egos. Their "hearts." Their agendas.
A person with BPD still can make distinctions between good and bad behavior. i've seen it demonstrated many times by many people with the condition. They admit to feelings of guilt. The problem is, they feel guilt because they know what they have done is harsh, cruel, rude, or just plain wrong... but they never learned how to empathize with those they have hurt. Most likely, no one empathized with their own suffering as it was forming their defense mechanisms years previous.
But they KNOW. They CAN distinguish the difference. They can CHOOSE to take an active role in their behavior patterns if they see value in it.
The value, ideally, should be "because it's best for everyone."
The value, more often in the real world is "so i can have friends and keep jobs."
It's still a value.
But some people choose an even more selfish and cold value for external self-control:
POWER.
"i
w a n t !"
Who wants power the most? Those who feel they have been powerless. Those who have had so much done to them beyond their control.
People with BPD naturally seek connection to and with other human beings. They also defensively seek control. Control over the interactions with others and the perceptions of them by others. If the satisfaction of the human connection eases the fears that demand control, these people can move towards a much better life.
A better path than those who get no satisfaction at all from connection to other human beings.
Anti-social personality disorders. That's what we're talking about. Personalities that work against the collective good and which tear apart the fabric of society and human connection.
When the only motivation left for someone with BPD is to seek power and control over everything and anything... they have stepped into sociopathy.
When the politics of the current Diagnostics and Statistics Manual of psychiatric disorders dictate obedience and subservience to certain rules, process and procedure in order for you to pursue your goals, your definitions and your rights, who is going to actively fight a system designed to protect itself? The DSM is, itself, a victim of victim mentality. Over extension. Over indulgence. The scientific method is abused this way and so too the "mental health system."
So, to repeat myself: i reduce the great, grand DSM down to what it really is: politics. i say a redundant "fuck you" to the DSM and i continue with my questions to you:
Is there a way back from the brink for a sociopath?
Should energy and time be spent seeking it?
Do sociopaths deserve that effort?
Is there a point at which we stop defining a sociopath as a victim and start defining them as nothing more or better than a weapon gone out of control?
Do you murder murderers?
If yes, do you execute sociopaths for the deeper, wider-ranging and longer lasting toxic effects they have on entire social structures?
You try to filter "criminals" out of society, but what do you do about the anti-social people who have no interest in society or who actively seek to control and manipulate it? Do you try to filter them out of society?
Most likely you don't even notice them.
Some of you might be becoming one of them right now... growing harder, colder, more selfish, more power-hungry, more obsessed with control and "having it YOUR WAY."
Maybe you're already one of them, looking at my blog and telling me how insufferable i am. Labeling my few supporters as "goons" and giving them other labels that essentially suggest i am a cult leader and they my mindless followers. i call bullshit on you. You're insecure. You couldn't express what you felt when you felt these things. That's when you choose to vote for charity to known sociopaths: you chose to protect your own interests. So you lash out at those who look familiar. Familiar as victims and victimizers.
Yourself.
You the victim and you the victimizer.
Labels: abuse, anti-social, BPD, choices, exposure, psychiatry, shame, sociopathy, the corporate states of america, truth
When I was 19 years old, my mother swallowed several bottles full of pills and ended her life.
