Sipping my coffee on the porch this morning after a few hours of deep meditation and reflection, I decided to share a journal entry. Normally, the staff writers of “Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Flying Monkeys — Oh My!” on Facebook and here at flyingmonkeysdenied.com strive to remain neutral in all situations, especially when creating articles and post reminders here on the page. But this morning was different. Today, we have as a team collectively agreed to share an excerpt from a non-academic piece of work, one titled “You Are Who You Decide To Be” for a very special and notable reason… because once again the day started for our first shift mod with an inbox full of hate mail from a person who is clearly psychologically and emotionally troubled who keeps sending in hate mail regarding our calm, rational advice — only this time, they were raging one of our fan page posts with a link to our main page shared the simple Narcissistic Abuse recovery mantra YOU ARE WHO YOU DECIDE TO BE.
People from all walks of life send us hate mail and leave the most brutally rude, cyber-bullying comments and private messages all the time. Mods are accused of being narcissists, Nazis, and hate-mongering. We crusade to truly advocate for Narcissistic Abuse victims, traumatized veterans, adult children of the most toxic parents on the planet, family members of people with Traumatic Brain Injuries, true crime victims, love fraud targets, and all people who have had their fundamental human rights or civil rights directly and quite personally violated by inhumane human beings with Cluster B personality types on a daily basis, this morning being no exception.
Today, the mod who was supposed to take the morning shift and work to program our fan page with supportive meme posts for victims and helpful advice for people in domestic violence situation was so traumatized by the angry and irrational cyberbully post that they functionally shut down and could not work.
What that means is a self-absorbed, egocentric asshole decided to vent their own life frustrations against a target — namely whoever happened to open the inbox first this morning and totally emotionally and psychologically damage a total stranger by cyberbullying for what reason? Based on the presumption they are socially entitled to say whatever mean-spirited, damaging, or toxic thing they want because they wrote in and asked how to handle that they were angry at their parents, job, spouse, life, boss, co-workers, university staff, the lunch lady at their elementary school cafeteria for giving someone else that last piece of shag carpet looking pizza, whatever?
People who are (for lack of a better word) tinged with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, or Anti-Social Personality Disorder are famous for engaging in the act of blame-shifting when and if they don’t get their way, fail at a task, or are given constructive criticism they do not want to hear. Rather than seeing human social interaction as a collaborative event where one person voluntarily engages in polite social interaction with another, each conversation (electronic or in-person) is magically twisted in some form of status-seeking competition.
In the case of the cyberbully who launched an electronic harassment attack against our mods for having shared a post with a phrase they did not like by attacking a Domestic Violence advocate with over 30 years of tireless, volunteer advocacy and legal insight who was not even responsible for having shared the post, the clearly abusive person robbed every single person that mod could have been helping today of the ability to receive moral support from one of the smartest, most loving, and most caring and best Narcissistic Abuse Recovery advocates to have themselves gotten out of an extreme abuse scenario alive.
Why ask why?
Because when a predator targets a pray and starts launching bullshit cyber attacks wildly aimed to hurt the maximum number of people they can, it’s emotional terrorism at it’s finest.
What the person decided to do last night and today is send a series of attack emails designed with no intent in mind but to emotionally and psychologically cause harm to whoever happened to open their written version of a dirty bomb. Not only is doing something like that legally questionable (as committing acts of stalking and aggravated stalking, cyberbullying, and harassment by electronic means being made illegal in many American states and internationally as of late), it’s truly morally reprehensible.
Which brings me (and yes, saying me in a writing assignment is something we — meaning the staff writers NEVER do in an academic forum)… which brings ME (the person replacing the other on shift with my volunteer time at the expense of my own clients today and family members who are now deprived of MY time while I voluntarily fill in as an act of empathy to the point of why I’ve chosen to share such a post in this typically academic forum directly.
The person who sends hate mail, launches smear campaigns, stalks, harasses, and does all they can to create a state of fear, hurt, and confusion for a victim so they can “get off” on feeling like a conversational predator is clearly attention-seeking in the most toxic and socially destructive of ways. Not only do they hurt the target, but they also deny that person’s family, friends, co-workers, and any person they normally could have come across in their daily life the ability to interact with that person in a meaningful way.
In the case of our abuse recovery page, 30k followers and any person in a real emotional crisis or true physical danger have been functionally deprived of working with that particular person today… and who knows what the domino effect of the mod being literally physically crippled as if they were an athlete playing on a soccer field that a dirty player from an opposing team ran up and took them out by injuring their knees.
A simple post with a lovely oil paint landscape, a link to the home page for this Narcissistic Abuse recovery site — a page that shares key terms and phrases of interest and gender-neutral help for trauma victims of all ages, ethnicities, sexual orientation, and lifestyle persuasions — with a self-help mantra of epic profundity pissed a social and emotional terrorist off. Apparently, because they did not like the quote, they felt “entitled” to send a terribly menacing and fear-producing hate mail out — landing it square in the face of a stalking victim whose aggressor used similar cyberbullying strategies that landed them in prison and totally devastated their entire family for more than a decade with regard to lifestyle?
The phrase YOU ARE WHO YOU DECIDE TO BE is a variation of a quote originally written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a brilliant philosopher who spent a great deal of his life and writing time sharing his own reflections on the human condition. He wrote, “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be…” — which for a victim of a tragedy or severe mental, physical, sexual, intellectual, or social abuse is a profound statement to hear and live life by in recovery.
Proper civic social response if one does not like a page is to unfollow it. Intelligent, moral human behavior prohibits attacking and bullying other people — noting that to launch any form of electronic or verbal attack against a person or group with whom you dislike or disagree with about a point as simple as “didn’t like a quote” is truly morally insane as well as legally offensive behavior.
Since the person sending attack emails has given no name or photograph, finding out who they are — or at the very least where they are sourcing the hate mail from — is something that can only be done by anonymous friends who are clever at skip-tracing ISPs. But that takes time and labor effort away from their lives as well, noting that one Cluster B personality has in essence damaged [at this point] at least 30-50 thousand people by sending one simple cyberbullying correspondence chain… or in this particular case a whopping pile of poop they flung with less civic regard than an angry and disgruntled circus monkey.
To a domestic abuse advocate, the gist we all take away from the “lesson” is that some people simply cannot be helped. They are who they decide to be.
The cyber-terrorist who elected to do serious emotional damage and harm to our staff advocate today — a person who was a total stranger to them and did them no harm or wrong in ANY way — acted of free will with full ability to NOT PUSH SEND. They were never asked to aggress our staff or to send hate mail, were involved in no caustic back and forth commentary, have not been antagonized or even paid attention to in any way other than to have been thanked for sending the equivalent of an “Is anybody there?” type email response followed by having been given the advice to secure enrollment in a different grad school program before initiating legal action against their university for, as they claimed, violating their Title IX rights to receive an education.
Geez.
How appalling our advocate who originally answered the letter was for having shared solid, honest, non-emotionally charged, good advice from a legal and IRL standpoint with the individual. Truly, having had expertise dealing with a contentious relationship with a post-doc instructor who they had to file charges against for sexual harassment when they were a student would not have given them any 20/20 hindsight that would qualify them to speak.
What’s more, telling the person who has been accused of harassing staff and faculty that changing schools at the end of the semester and securing their graduate recommendations before they sue the school is prudent in order to avoid the pitfall of a teacher’s not being willing or able to write them letters of recommendation was — in the person’s opinion — enough to trigger what is known in psychology social circles as “Narcissistic Injury”.
Any logical, emotionally rational, and mature individual who understands corporate life or academia in any way shape or form — abuse victim or not — knows full well that before you attack a civic organization like a school, corporate environment, or simply a professional establishment that it’s just plain smart to have another job or enrollment acceptance lined up first. It’s also obvious that it is beyond the pale of rude behavior to send any page or person hate mail.
If you don’t like the advice you are given after writing in for help, either say thank you to the person who answered and completely ignore their opinion or simply never contact, read, or follow up with that person’s web project or related social media sites at all. Why? Because if you choose to act like a social terrorist, guess what…
THAT’S EXACTLY WHO YOU DECIDE TO BE.
As for our staff, we’ll (and hopefully the mod who was sent reeling into a downward PTSD spiral after being shocked into an emotional crisis state by simply opening a disgustingly creepy and abusive chain of emails while expecting to help provide care, comfort, and advice to a person in crisis seeking advocacy) will [most likely] be able to recover post haste…
But we feel bad that based on this particular incident that we have to change our site-wide policy of answering everybody — even if their plea for attention seems like they are confused and seeking legitimate help for proper socialization in civil society.
You see, the original set of posts that came in from the cyber aggressor shared that they were being unjustly persecuted. Sadly, many victims of workplace bullying or domestic violence have their legal or social reputations black-marked by abusive accusers who do things like lie, distort truths, and con higher-ups like court officials or management teams.
In the case of the person who clearly is guilty of harassing others and aggravated stalking using electronic communication to cause intense emotional duress in their targeted victims or any collateral damage victim they can — by dirty cyber bomb method hurt, psychologically harm, or emotionally incapacitate — our team responded with compassion and a moral sense of decency, sharing pragmatic advice to allow the person to move forward with their life in the least academically crippling of ways. Abusers guilty of harassing their faculty or not, if they plan on making waves, moving to another school first could have allowed them the opportunity to matriculate at a different institution where the teachers were not biased against them as a student (having heard through the grapevine the person was caustic or antagonistic towards people who are in positions of authority over them in any way).
Did our team suspect the person might have done something legally or morally wrong to have had formal charges filed against them?
Sure. But guess what…
Since most of our older staff members and volunteers have Cluster B children or family members of their own, we strive to give socially pro-active help to people who show an interest in living life in a more harmonious of ways. This includes but is not limited to working countless volunteer and paid professional hours mentoring at-risk children and teens all across the country who have things like Childhood Conduct Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, helping head injury patients learn how to properly socialize after injury from a behavioral management standpoint, helping people who are already in the criminal justice system and listed as felons who are coming out of prison or jail rehabilitate, non-traditional students, victims of hate crimes or war crimes, severely traumatized soldiers who have been injured at war or held hostage at some point and have been desensitized to normal emotions, the most brutally physically and sexually abused or neglected children, victims of violent crime who suffer from the most extreme forms of PTSD, domestic violence or domestic abuse victims with the most bone-chilling of life stories that have net gained them nothing for their years of caring about toxic people social and financial ruin coupled with scorching cases of C-PTSD, and more.
To be an empathetic person who strives to do good in the world on a daily basis regardless of personal life history or daily circumstances is a choice. It’s a choice all victim’s advocates face at one time or another — risking putting oneself out on a proverbial limb to offer caring and compassionate moral support for a victim knowing full well that the helping hand proffered might be metaphorically bit.
But it is a decision we make on a day to day, hour to hour, and minute to minute basis willingly and with the full impetus of a free-will decision about whether or not to “engage”.
WE — as Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Advocates…
WE are exactly who WE decide to be.
Are we a victim, as a business entity, of cyber harassment from a legal standpoint today? Absolutely.
Has our organization been forever changed by the actions of one hateful person who aggressed our writers, abuse advocates, and mods with hate mail that borders on aggravated stalking by electronic means?
Absolutely… because now, we must for practical security reasons only — in an attempt to protect the civil and emotional human rights of our volunteers and employees from being put in a state of regressed PTSD terror — start screening emails BEFORE they are allowed to answer on shifts as well as to stop answering any person whose written inquiry for advice reflects clearly they are most likely to themselves have a Cluster B personality disorder or narcissistic affectation even if they claim they were framed or set up unjustly.
What this one incredibly selfish person’s irrational cyberbullying agenda has done is create a cascade of falling dominoes that is now likely to harm not only people who could have been helped by the volunteer who was functionally unable to DO THEIR JOB BECAUSE THEY WERE SO UPSET AND FRIGHTENED BY THE HATE MAIL ACCUSATIONS AND PERSON WHO IS OBVIOUSLY FIXATING but also leave our organization as a team less likely to help someone like a whistleblower who is frustrated at having been blacklisted by a true Cluster B predator smear campaigning.
Do we want to help people — even those with Cluster B affectations — learn how to more gracefully move through life without being attacked themselves or conversely causing other human beings an inordinate amount of personal, social, financial, legal, or professional suffering? Absolutely.
Does that mean we are not human beings entitled to a right to do so without being libeled, slandered, stalked, threatened socially, emotionally or physically, or allowed to express our own subjective opinions without being lambasted by some immature or just plain abusive cyberstalking egocentric social and emotional terrorist?
No chance, kiddo.
Cheers to all the mods, domestic violence advocates, readers who send in letters of thanks, or who write supportive comments to our mods and staff on a DAILY basis thanking us for our labor of love project advocating for Narcissistic Abuse victims around the globe. For every nasty hate mail that arrives, based on statistics alone, we net gain ourselves 99 positive and helpful comments, noting that the personality type of people who actively engage in socially caustic behaviors like cyber harassing is less than one to two percent of the global population (statistically speaking).
Do people with an extreme sense of entitlement and a sadistic streak who love to manufacture chaos while striving to attention-seek exist in the world? To quote that obnoxious bigoted pitbull with lipstick Sarah Palin, “You betcha!”
Are we, as empathic human beings running an online board have to take shit from them on any given day or for any reason — or even allow such a person to influence our company members emotionally?
To be triggered (when you are a person who suffers from PTSD or C-PTSD) is not a choice humans can control. Noticing when we are in a hyper-alert, reactive (rather than reflective), or emotionally vulnerable state and stepping away from a volunteer post for a bit to focus on our own issues is part of our team protocol.
We spend countless hours surfing the net for academic material students who are seeking to do a senior thesis, master’s degree or Ph.D. dissertation work can use for paper citations.
We promise our readers complete anonymity when they write us by email or private message on Facebook, using a mix of their stories and our own to put out time-sensitive articles of unique personal interest to literally ONE PERSON AT A TIME… articles that we share openly and publicly with all in the hopes that if we have hit on a pattern of Narcissistic Abuse that’s rare that our article will fill a void on the net by sharing academic and reflective insights as a primary and secondary source (both) for abuse victims suffering in perhaps the same way or ways to connect with on a personal level everywhere.
Do we get 99% of our hate mail and nasty comments left by people who clearly are proud of being abusers?
Yup.
A quick peek at the profile of people who leave us the cruelest and abusive of antagonistic and non-helpful, attention-seeking, ad hominem attack commentary tells us all we need to know about most cyberbullies. Typically a miserable lot who spend most of their time posting drivel to attack their friends, family, or some stereotypes group they don’t like leaves us feeling sad but able to quickly and effectively sort and depersonalize.
[As of late we see a lot of confederate flags, tons of people actively stumping for Donald Trump, and people who share primarily hate-speech laden post toppers over links shares of either false claims targeting a political candidate they don’t like or FOX NEWS posts. Of course, there are always the now infamous #DuckHunting “Duck Lip” somatic female narcissists posts and men who are proud “players” who are misogynistic who leave witless commentary on occasion, too, but for the most part, those we simply delete or hide their comments from others in the hopes that someday reality will dawn on them and they will stop glorifying their own pound-foolish and inane behaviors.]
But in the case of people who write us while acting like Covert Narcissists who set our staff members up for advocacy failure by misleading our staff and mods into helping so a person can launch a Machiavellian style Dark Triad assault on their emotions and intellectual integrity later for no other purpose than letting the abuser vent steam and get themselves off intellectually by engaging in abusive social behavior? That’s some bootstrapping horseshit wading of a different sort entirely.
To the staff member who needed to take a day for yourself, we applaud your emotional honesty. We hope that your day is spent in productive self-centering while you take as much time as you need (today, tomorrow, for all your shifts this week, next week, or if necessary for all eternity) to recover from the pain the person’s antagonistic words triggered in your consciousness.
We hope that all the life advice the staffer gives to other people going through psychological or emotional crises won’t be forgotten. Depersonalize abusive words shared by people with Cluster B personalities, understand their impulse to harm other human beings is nothing more than their constant need to be the center of attention and feel powerful, stay in a non-reactive gray rock position of observing people’s words and deeds as an infinite cosmic loop of motion inextricably bound to be considered simultaneously as a reflection of their own character and parallel universe of moral (or immoral) need, and walk it off or nurse emotional wounds according to whatever amount of linear time the human psychological form needs in order to return to a state of emotional health, wellness, calmness, and spiritual well-being.
We’ve got your back, babes. Believe it.
As for the readers, our team simply wants you to know that every time you share one of our articles, leave us a +1, or click like on one of our articles, posted links, or memes that you give moral support and validation to not only our staff but all the other readers. Having spent a lifetime (most of us) being told that our concepts of moral personal and professional behavior were “overly sensitive”, “crazy”, “out of touch”, or just plain “irrational”, as advocates and abuse victims ourselves we are comforted knowing that no matter how loud people with Cluster B personality types are or how violent they get that their cognitive distortions about how humans by nature should treat one another is nothing more than blustery crap.
Humans may have primate DNA somewhere in their genetic makeup, but on a social Darwinian evolutionary scale alone those clans or tribes who are the most successful and functionally happy in life follow a social order more like ants than some poo-flinging, fist-to-chest-beating, howling aggressive, self-aware but socially clueless and angry monkeys. Ants know what job they do best, do their best to support the colony, and simultaneously have their own physical and communal needs [on most occasions] met.
Ant colonies are fascinating to study for this reason alone — as the cooperation between individual actors allows the entire colony to thrive, arguably socially and from an evolutionary perspective to thrive.
A quick trip to the zoo or a circus featuring animals will tell you that people who engage in predatory or pack animal behaviors are not only dangerous to others but they live an egocentric and self-focused existence. Monkeys literally fling poo at the faces of their contemporaries and onlookers for no other reason than to cause the other party social embarrassment or humiliation while forcing the target to have to waste personal physical and emotional time cleaning themselves up from the damaging mess the jerky monkey — in their self-indulgent, emotionally charged and short-sighted act of failing to show respect to another or self-control — created.
Such is the deal with the malevolent and “at best” socially misguided sect of human beings who act like the most juvenile of mean girls, launching off emails and hate-speech laden critical or threatening and verbally abusive attacks on people’s character online or in person.
People with Cluster B personality disorders like NPD tend to lash out at other people based on entitlement based thinking coupled with a functional lack of intellectual or emotional empathy because they are social misfits — not people with insight, wisdom, honor, or manners.
People with BPD are compulsive situational abusers, able to go from raging and acting like the most abusive Narcissist on the planet to the most depressed and put-upon social “victims” faster than a Lamborghini goes from zero to 60 MPH — noting that their frequent and socially destructive temper tantrums are never unleashed on people like judges or court officials. Such people only tend to unload on strangers cause in their cross-hairs when seeking a person or target to abuse or their most loving, close, kind, and caring but dim-witted family members.
Those with HPD go over the top to exaggerate claims they have a right to aggress others, such as is most likely the case of the current predator. How dare someone not pay enough attention to them or tell them exactly what they want to hear? How dare someone offer constructive criticism or helpful advice after being asked for their opinion about how to more effectively (from a life coaching standpoint alone) steer?
Folks with ASPD who are biologically predisposed to psychopathic behaviors are — for lack of a better term — the “meanest”, meaning most prone to commit violent acts or lash out at their friends, family members, coworkers, and strangers in the most menacing of ways. Those with sociopathic traits are a bit calmer, basically having auras that are for the most part emotionally flat-lined, noting that witnessing or experiencing severe trauma themselves is likely to have functionally incapacitated the area of the brain that allows them to process life experiences with empathy or in a complex emotional way.
Individuals who drink or do drugs and start typing abusive remarks to attack people or fan page presenters they do not like are guilty of moral stupidity as much or more so than anyone…
But people who reach out for advice to a Narcissistic Abuse page while pretending to be a person in need of moral support and sound advocacy? Then cyber-attack whoever takes enough time out of the sheer goodness of their heart to try to help while answering their questions honestly and in such a way that allows the person writing in to make social progress from whatever psychological or emotional level they are at as an act of non-paternalistic empathy?
Seriously, guys and dolls…
That shit is CRAZY.
And by that, we don’t mean cray-cray (like we all are who are forced day in and day out to endure having to listen to the blatherings of non-thinking, emotionally immature people who are self-centered to the point of being considered personality disordered when compared to the rest of logical, loving, kind-natured, and FUNCTIONAL humanity). Such behavior is not only premeditated, but it’s also highly Machiavellian and intentionally structured to abuse people’s time and bodies using Trickster’s word choices to harm.
By “CRAZY” (the ad hominem medical assault on a sane person that accurately described the behavior of self and society sabotaging Cluster B humans)…
We mean that any person who engages in such heinous acts of abusing others is MORALLY INSANE, doomed to live lives in intellectual and social “solitary confinement”… meaning that due to their own egocentrism and competitive predatory behaviors that they are unlikely to ever functionally be able to experience the joy of connecting on a compatriot level with other human beings regardless of blood ties or affectionate behaviors.
To that end, we wish all people afflicted with Cluster B personality types or who engage in abusive acts of deviant social behavior a nice day elsewhere. We’ve already noted YOU ARE WHO YOU DECIDE TO BE, so going “No Contact” and avoiding you completely to the point we psychologically and emotionally go gray rock and turn our backs on you as untreatable people who cannot be “helped” can be done by us in a loving manner, guilt-free.
The phrase, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” comes to mind with no disrespect to Sammael intended for his acts devotedly serving God by mirroring to other people what they are inside. If we’re perceived as an organization by Cluster B people to be socially harming them by letting their victims know that kowtowing to their bullish tactics of demanding their personal needs be met at the exclusive expense of everyone else but themselves, so be it.
And if some obnoxious little academic elitist, cerebral narcissist with a complex psychological or moral decay inspired personality type wants to stomp their feet, hold their breath, hurl insults at other people, or posture in such a way that they cause other grown adult human beings to collapse into a PTSD regressed state of “stalking” inspired fear for that person’s own selfish, self-aggrandizing and sadistic reasons in order to feel grandiose for the day?
Seriously…
We don’t know or care who you are, what your parents were like, who you think harmed or embarrassed you publicly, or any other thing about you as a human entity whose subjective life experience matters to us one iota either way. Get over yourself, find a local therapist who specialized in treating people with complex Cluster B personality disorders if you truly want help, but otherwise, STOP WASTING OUR TIME. We are who we decide to be, and as a team that is Narcissistic Abuse Recovery advocates who could care less about the attention-seeking need of any person who actively and of their own free will elects to socially, emotionally, legally, personally, professionally, or physically aggress other human beings in a caustic, targeted, directly or indirectly harmful or emotionally antagonistic of ways.
Readers who happen upon this post in our social media feeds or who have directly visited Flying Monkeys Denied who like reading our posts and have sorted their own wheat from the chaff with regard to picking and choosing helpful insights that apply directly to their own unique life situations without feeling the need to insult our staff or harangue mods for sharing a quote or article link they don’t feel in their subjective circumstances personally apply are encouraged to click LIKE or share this post with friends and family when and if the link rolls by…
And once again, to all our readers who feel our public posts have helped or who have worked privately behind the scenes with our Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Experts over the years on this project and through our sister pages and advocate organizations… we cannot begin to thank you enough for sharing your stories and sending little things like post links of interest, motivational memes by PM, and thank you declarations of support to our mods. Each time you do, you help us override our own fears running a website that focuses on tackling such deeply emotional and personal topics. You help us keep going when our own personal lives are frustrating and tough. But the comments you leave in a public venue to simply say things like SAME, ME TOO, MY (ex, mother, father, brother, child, stepchild, current abuser, toxic friend, etc.) does that same thing all the TIME to me?
For validation of our reader’s sanity alone, those helpful YEP style comments confirming patterns of gaslighting, bullying, undermining, sabotaging, victimizing a target, brainwashing, manipulating, or whatever Narcissistic Abuse tactic your predator used against you over the years — to us, as victim’s advocates — mean perhaps the most.
When we launched the project on April 1 of 2014 with a fan page devoted to sharing articles of academic insight as a public outreach supporting our domestic violence underground railroad of sorts, we expected a few hundred people might benefit from connecting with our group on social media. The volume of private messages asking for support — not to “fix” or do anything other than lead people in the direction from an academic self-help standpoint to the right key terms and phrases to use while surfing the internet seeking an understanding of complex and dysfunctional social situations has been overwhelming.
As of the date of publishing this article, the fan page has over 30 thousand followers who we strive to provide hourly reminders that they are not imagining that abuse is WRONG to dish out or having to suffer through and endure.
We launched this website project based on reader inquiries asking for advice. If we could not find a satisfactory article from a reliable source to answer their mentoring need-based question, we pooled team collective experience resources and have created the most gender-neutral and non-emotionally charged body of academic-themed “primary source” information written more so as a “secondary source” material fact base that for psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology “nerds” absolutely delights.
Our staff advocates all have direct, personal experience with dealing with a variety of Cluster B personality types. All came from toxic families or have themselves gone through high conflict divorces, all mentor and advocate as a way to give back following the “pay it forward” method of social advocacy (meaning they share helpful information with other humans in a loving way without the expectation of personal gain or reward as a promise to share information that was once told to help personally or save and mentor them on their journey from actively having been victimized to learning how to reframe negative experiences in such a way that they are no longer willing participants in a toxic shaming cycle having turned survivor), and all are here solely from the goodness of their heart day after day striving to give hope to people who without it may be suicidal or place themselves physically in such harm’s way in proximity to dangerous people that they might not otherwise have the life skills to survive.
Say what you will, haters… but when was the last time YOU set your own needs aside for the sake of other human beings in an effort to make the world a better place? While you self-stroke and get off on manipulating and abusing others, you might THINK you are “winning” some twisted and sick social game but all you truly (in the eyes of 80% of humanity) have effectively done is estranged yourself in such a way your life is likely to be spent lonely and of poor quality, noting that nice people tend over the long haul and reflect back with a sense of spiritual comfort at how they effectively spent personal and professional time during their lives.
If you think of yourself as a powerless victim of abuse, that’s who and what you are…
On the other hand, if individuals choose to think more of themselves…
To strive to do better…
To BE better…
Those are the people who recover fully from emotional abuse. Those are the people who become the healers and the helpers. Those are the people who receive spiritual and material comforts and blessings from mindfully interacting with other humans in such a way that they create win-win social interactions at every social opportunity.
Did the antagonist “win” their quest to damage a stranger emotionally and psychologically and cause them to revert to a state of social and emotional agoraphobia today of sorts, thereby by default harming every human being who could have otherwise had a positive and HELPFUL interaction with the person who took the brunt of the emotional terror assault as well as our own team members en masse?
ABSOLUTELY.
But the joke is actually they themselves — not even on them.
Why?
Because any self-respecting abuse survivor knows that social interaction between humans of goodwill nature is NEVER competitive, it’s only collaborative. As such, while they [meaning the Abuser] may feel like they won a victory by bullying one of our volunteers so badly that they are considering stepping down to avoid being further targeted by a stranger for their willingness to advocate for abuse victims [again], the game they were playing out energetically in their own head was and remains one of purely deluded, cognitive distortion fantasy.
Since no one working on this team competes with one another, our own friends, family members, partners, co-workers, spouses, strangers we meet on the streets, or ever with a reader, there is never a win or lose scenario fostered by our personal or professional behavior. To aggress us for volunteer human advocacy serves no purpose other than to let an abusive person sink deeper into their own psychiatric delusions in such a way that they bring negative spiritual karma on themselves and prevent their own intellect, from a social standpoint alone, from functionally or pragmatically succeeding.
Acting like a predator might be great for a lion seeking a meal, but if you are a human who psychologically and emotionally feels a need to shred other people’s emotions in order to feel powerful? That’s rooted in a personality disorder, not something likely to make an individual or a collective pack of predators in the long run from an evolutionary perspective succeed.
Just as we have seen countless Cluster B elderly parents who spent a lifetime claiming themselves as part of the “Greatest Generation” die on the vine socially and emotionally over the years abusing their friends and family members, we now see toxic baby boomers and narcissistic youth socially and emotionally flailing and failing.
Cannot get along with peers? Ostracized from interaction with kind and loving people — forced by default to surround yourself 24/7 with dysfunctional enablers and weaker Cluster B personality types? Or worse — sucking up to stronger and more overtly predatory individuals in an attempt to win their protective favor?
Cyberbullying or verbally attacking random strangers for fun and sport because you feel the need to hurt other people, embarrass, or humiliate them for no other reason that you think you have a right is most likely rooted in a deep-seated feeling of social and emotional neglect that causes an antagonistic person to lash out at other people for no other reason than you are feeling lonely, are upset with a person or situation that has nothing to do with the people you attack, and or you have no excuse other than being bored.
Bottom line, if “you” are personalizing the aforementioned statement, chances are YOU might have a Cluster B personality disorder.
But keep in mind, regardless of having that moniker as an excuse… you are who you decide to be. No one makes you stalk, hunt, or push send. If you act like a bully or emotional terrorist, covert or not… your social and moral integrity descends.
