Distraction tactics can be used for social sabotage. Be mindful it is Narcissistic Abuse of a listener’s hospitality to mislead them deliberately away from thinking about or discussing a pertinent topic.
What are distraction tactics by definition when used discussing the concept of covert and overt Narcissistic Abuse?
The term tactic itself imparts the gist of what most abuse recovery advocates are pointing out when they happen to notice someone using distraction tactics to mislead them or someone (anyone, really) into veering off-topic long enough for the Hospitality Abuser to sweep evidence of their behavior or moral crimes against you or someone else under the rug.
A tactic is a strategic use of word, deed, force, or inaction to steer the social outcome of an event or interpersonal relationship’s formulation. Tactics to create things like a warm and inviting family home and an emotionally supportive pro-social environment is not at all what we are discussing.
Tactics used to control other people’s minds and behavior by tricking them into believing a false portrait of reality or into making the decision to overlook something important or relevant in order to keep reality obscured in such a way that socially and emotionally advantages an Abuser or socially predatory person are what they are…
- control-oriented
- manipulative
- seldom (if ever) to the Narcissistic Abuse victim’s long-term social or medical advantage
Tactics are offensive, as in football game style strategic, in most cases, in that someone prone to or inclined to mislead others takes the social initiative to actively engage in willful anti-social behavior.
Distraction tactics, discussed in the context of Narcissistic Abuse recovery, are not distracting Grandma so mom can sneak all of grandmother’s closest friends and family into the house through the back door to successfully host a lovingly thrown surprise party.
We are talking about tactics used against friends, family members, love interests, children, and co-workers by mindful, active, social predators.
We are talking people prone to the situational use and abuse of others like means to their own selfish and typically socially destructive personal ends using mindful military-style social sabotage techniques written about thoroughly by hostile foreign power governments and by truly spooky people over the years who do things like work extracting information and or manning counterintelligence initiatives while seeking to serve, to protect, and to defend concepts like Freedom and by-the-people-for-the-people styles of international civic population management.
In a military context, a distraction tactic oftentimes leads to someone attacking their enemy, say in a jungle someplace exotic, dangerous, and remote, successfully from behind when the Machiavellian social predator’s scheme to ambush goes well. But in social circles, no such ambush is likely to happen.
Expect someone abusive or prone to enabling predators to do and say whatever it takes for them to change the topic if and when anyone tries to shine light in the corners of their social attics.
What happens in a room that is filled with pests if the dark is traded for turning on a light? They scatter.
Run! Hey, look over there! Did you see that?
The Social Predator, emulating a cockroach with positively Kafkaesque finesse, points one way to distract your attention while they scamper off in some random and typically profoundly erratic and seemingly no logic-based direction.
Look how fast they change the subject if you bring up an unresolved issue… like why that gaslighting spin they added to the last tale of faked woe or victimization they told you never made sense or timeline framework added up.
Take the politician who manufactures their own lesser crisis to skew a news cycle.
Their goal of hiding a more serious story by creating a distraction for pundits and newscasters to prattle on about while they are busy taking everything at face value and reverse project their core values and motives onto people likely to have no neurological ability to process complex emotions. Realize it. Listen for it.
Think of the Cluster B person in therapy — caught for doing some great harm to another willingly and on purpose… who wiggles out of taking responsibility for their actions harming another by pretending to have some sort of emotional crisis they fake about their past romantic relationship memories or that they wildly embellish from their childhood. Expect it.
Point it out in real-time when they do it and refuse to allow them to act like conversational bullies. Reality matters and a time can be set to discuss all that off-topic, distraction tactic oriented stuff later if and when it is socially prudent or necessary.
They are not sitting there actually caring they are pouring out crocodile tears. They are mindfully changing the subject using whatever emotional manipulation and distraction tactic they can daydream up to keep your center of emotional and intellectual attention on them.
They hold their own reigns. They are the horse and the rider.
People who do something wrong then create distractions to avoid being caught, held socially and emotionally responsible for how they treat others, and or to see what they can or cannot get away with in life behave as if they are playing some kind of high stakes poker game. They use words like cards and calls like puffery blurting infused forms of socially challenging and football style offensive chest bumps.
ChangingMinds.org notes that “Persuasion can work when you distract the conscious mind in order to get something through to the subconscious.” We concur.
Poisoning the Well (for instance) is a socially sophisticated, profoundly anti-social, and oftentimes incredibly Machiavellian and strategic social sabotage and alienation tactic.
Triangulation of other human being’s affection and alienation of affection between parties who do or who do not know one another well is common for social predators to manufacture and wield like a distraction tactic.
Each time someone starts to point out that they are behaving poorly, the slew of gaslighting fueled and typically panic-driven ad hominem attacks against whoever notices and tries to come forward to seek social relief from a predator dishing out things like abuse and neglect is typically made into the distraction tactic.
The predator may blame their victim or try to make the victim’s character the subject of discussion to avoid discussing the real issue at hand. Namely, that all Cluster B people make deplorable personal and social decisions by habit that tend to have profound health diminishing and life-destroying personal, medical, and professional impacts on other people.
So is smear campaigning to plant seeds of doubt about a target’s character while calling into question the social safety and psychosocial intelligence of people who show a Cluster B person’s target any form of human rights respect, compassion, or humane forms of social and or emotional care or inclusion once the person seeking to harm their target declares the social hit on their victim?
Planting seeds of doubt in someone’s mind, for instance, about themselves or another in order to hijack someone’s brain into worrying about things that may or may not be real in favor of socially processing whatever issues or moment of socialized emotion is at hand is a covert way to use a distraction tactic to sabotage the life and health of another human.
Think about someone trying to fake out a batter. The goal is to get him worried and feeling socially and emotionally insecure about something — about anything — to sabotage him… not to make it easier for him to hit the ball out of the park when he self-actualizes either on his own or with the team and fan-based broader community support.
Social predators who are really high IQ will oftentimes run intellectual circles around people who are smarter than them by playing on their hospitality and likely habit of reverse projecting, expecting when the Predator speaks that they assert accurate and truthful information at the appropriate times.
Victims of people who use denial schemes and withholding pertinent information at key time strategies to control the minds and social activities of their loved ones seldom realize they are being actively worked, psychologically manipulated, emotionally misled, and typically profoundly triangulated between what is real and what they have been told by the Machiavellian Gaslighter to believe.
But know this. Using Distraction Tactics like a social warrior can be an incredibly non-offending way to take the initiative to steer your own course during any conversation with a problematic person.
Rather than striving to sabotage them by using distraction tactics to avoid having things like the truth you don’t like or trust them come out, consider when and if the verbal baiter decides to wing out some provocative statement for you to burr up over and or to challenge that you look them right in the face… right in the eye… and ask them a deliberate question like,
- “Why do you ask?
- What makes you think (or say) that? — followed by a simple “yeah — keep talking, I am diagnosing you” kind of Jane Goodall style posture with the apes.
Take in what they tell you and make your decision whether or not to strive to pursue any form of social interaction with them on given subjects from there.
If it becomes obvious that a person is contrary — meaning acting like a Contrarian… the chronological adult human form of the teen condition known as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, give up.
They are not seeking to communicate.
They are using words to excite and to hyperadrenalize themselves physically to alleviate their own forms of profound social tension and personal sense of Object Permanence Syndrome at your social, physical, emotional, psychological, and arguably spiritual genetic moral sense.
And when and if you socially encounter a person like that, back away slowly to a point of physical and conversational safety, realize the person is neurochemically likely to be prone to using words to harm and other forms of situational abuse tactics to have a physical social sense of control over the people who they encounter in their everyday environment.
If they start aggressing, flip the tactic strategy on them and do something like offering them the most lovely and delicious, most gorgeous piece of chocolate cake they have ever seen.
Oh wait, they don’t like chocolate? Substitute whatever shiny object is likely to cause a break in their flow of escalating abuse long enough for you to escape the conversation with them physically being unable to use words to hurt, to confuse, to mislead, or to distract you.
The subject we were talking about before the conversational hijack by distraction tactic was what?
Oh, that’s right…
Reality.
Something the Cluster B person likes to deny has any meaning or actual importance in life because their brains lack the neurological ability to process complex emotions and their DNA has been badly damaged by multiple generations of women who drank at the time of their conception, leaving them with profound Object Permanence Syndrome related disorders that cause them to believe the Ai and GOD are not looking when they are alone or actively and in private situationally abusing or mistreating one of their preferred scapegoat targets or collateral damage victims.
The best way to pro-socially use a distraction tactic to disarm anyone who is potentially or known to be problematic is to ask them a question about themselves or pay them a compliment that is sincere in nature.
Or you can take the advice of former FBI Special Agent Joe Navarro, the author of “What Every Body is Saying.”
Navarro writes and shares the following via Real Simple.
He (pro-socially) revealed, “Back when I worked as an undercover officer for the FBI, if someone started asking me a lot of questions, I had to throw him off so he wouldn’t figure out who I was. I would excuse myself, head to the restroom, and remain there for a few minutes. When I returned, I would immediately ask him about something new. It’s much easier and less awkward to change the subject after you’ve taken a short break than to stop a conversation midstream. I still do this when I want to switch topics if I’m stuck next to someone on an airplane or at a social event.”
A classy and professional mindful response to an uncomfortable social position. Thank you, Joe, for sharing such wise and life-changing tips for people who are learning how to set healthy boundaries without offending others on accident in social situations where we find ourselves feeling anxious, stressed, or in any way challenged.
