Recovering from a smear campaign takes time, mindful gray rock techniques, education, and ruthless self-examination. It is possible to do, in theory, but the process seldom feels like something warm and fuzzy.
Smear Campaigning is the art of targeting a Narcissistic Rival — with or without their knowledge — for social harm and intentional infliction of emotional distress as a reflection of the Machiavellian social predator’s core nature and grossly immoral selfish addiction to emotional hedonism.
People who smear campaign are typically Cluster B by nurture and or by nature. Those who listen to and spend time with people who smear campaign are known in self-help literature shared by Narcissistic Abuse recovery advocates as Flying Monkeys.
Flying Monkey personality types are what they are — prone to enabling social abuse and mistreatment (oddly enough) of themselves as well as of others in an attempt to win the social approval and affection of stronger social predators. Social Predators who typically succeed at using gaslighting and brainwashing tactics to convince those who esteem them to fear, mistrust, or to shun kind, socially trustworthy, and emotionally intelligent people.
Smear campaigns, also referred to as smear tactics, printing libel, sharing slander remarks orally, or poisoning the well against a targeted mark or social rival, are mindfully crafted courses of conduct engaged in by Social Predators to harm other people using a mix of words and graphic imagery (typically) to alienate their actual marks from their preferred scapegoats or from people a Machiavellian person has decided to harm for their own self-promoting or selfish purposes.
It is an effort to damage another human being’s or peer groups’ social reputation — smear campaigning. It’s a tactic used in war.
War.
There. We said it — twice.
A person who decides to declare social war against a targeted human being or peer group using words to hurt as well as to meddle and intrude into the lives and minds of people the person or peers using vocabulary choices like weapons is choosing to behave on the social offense. Each weaponized word launched is an individual assault on collective humanity.
They attack NLP using shaming and shunning techniques designed to hurt the target while compromising the feelings and social intelligence of those who they seek to aid them in deliberately abusing their social target by proxy, the people who use words to harm or to emotionally and psychologically assault other people.
Knowing it’s a tactic — a calculated use of a deliberately below the belt form of social war crime to mislead other human beings into fearing or mistrusting someone who is socially trustworthy — can literally prevent anyone with a clear head and functional emotional intelligence (EQ) from falling into the Flying Monkeys inspired neural soup.
When someone lies to and about another, they reveal their most covert core nature. When someone name calls, gaslights others, and bullies to socially seek to advantage themselves at the deliberate expense of another they self-reveal their own thoughts, mindset, and truly socially untrustworthy intellectual as well as emotional processing.
Understanding that people who smear campaign get off on misleading their closest friends, family members, co-workers, and social support network as much or more than they delight in harming, insulting, or embarrassing you is step one to breaking the hold nurtured toxic shame responses are likely to have over your intellect and over you when and if you have been targeted by someone ultimately Flying Monkey – esque or acting like a disgruntled aspiring Alpha Primate flinging poo.
Their goal is to have everyone call into question everything they think they know about an otherwise good or unknown to the person.
As the Smear Campaigner sees someone is willing to listen to them badmouth another, the number of smears hefted against their targeted pinata and gaslighting distortions to confuse and mislead their actual mark are likely to escalate in proportion to how clueless they are being emotionally conned.
Expect them to talk at length to anyone who does not yet really know the person the hospitality abuser has chosen to alienate from their mark about how terrible and or socially dangerous their rival is in an attempt to ensure that the mark they recruit as a Flying Monkey will also repeat gaslighting claims about the targeted person to harm, insult, and socially isolate them.
By keeping a person who they want to harm isolated socially from people who actually had a moral duty or obligation to support and be kind to or to include the black-marked “other”, the predator makes that person’s experience of life in society that much more physically painful and terrorizing.
Keeping someone already betrayed by an Alpha predator humiliated, left with little to no social or emotional support after being exposed to social trauma, and feeling profoundly unloved and left deliberately unprotected by society does permanent social and emotional harm to victims of campaigns to ostracize them from society. Medical damage. Not simply all the social, emotional, and psychological and or spiritual damage people commonly might expect abuse and social neglect victims to suffer.
To recover requires making a mindful choice to end all forms of socializing with anyone who is playing both sides of the fence with regard to their personal social posturing. Not only is it necessary to end all forms of social and emotional enmeshment with your primary abuser, it’s essential for health to also create a safe social and physically distant emotional and intellectual space to keep smear campaign survival in proper context.
Getting real about admitting what we can and cannot change if we have been the target of someone else’s bitterness, gaslighting, and profound social and emotional dishonesty is the most efficient place to start self-reflecting.
There’s a difference between being someone like a Hillary Clinton or a Dr. Blasey Ford who has to cope with the social and emotional macrocosm of the results of smear campaigning on them personally and trying to recover your social reputation when less than 100 human beings have heard your name framed in a nasty and intentionally socially maligning context.
By focusing on the microcosm — keeping reality in perspective — one can take a deep breath and realize that an Abuser is only able to shame or harm us using words as much or as little as we choose to allow them to engage in socially deplorable acts of literal emotional energy extortion.
People are most likely to believe misinformation or intentional disinformation spread about someone who they see as different from themselves. Conversely, those who hear someone dishing salacious sounding gossip intended to triangulate anyone’s affection from a targeted other… once we are educated about the social and emotional abuse tactic of smear campaigning… are likely to realize the red flag we are reading, seeing as witnesses, or that we are hearing.
By noting when someone blurts rude, Machiavellian, caustic intentioned word choices either in person using speech or using electronic methods to voice their calculated and profoundly anti-social assertions in proper context related to timing and the development of the Blurter’s Forensic Psychology while remaining gray rock, one can more readily depersonalize abuse and begin to realize why treating such claims or toxic assertions as if they have any subjective credibility whatsoever is a mistake.
A mistake.
Yes — a mistake.
The most pro-social and healthy way to handle a smear campaign is head-on and directly. Not by engaging with the person spreading the rumor or by indulging Sadistic Voyeurs who come to you to tell you all about what the person Alpha striving to harm you said.
Realize the BETA SOCIAL PREDATOR who is socializing with someone talking smack about you is the person who is actually doing you as well as your reputation the most direct and incredibly personal harm and damage.
A social predator who is OVERT one can deal with and process exposure to in an intelligent and typically prompt and swift manner.
Oh… so let me get this right: my ex-husband who abused me and his mother don’t like me and his former mistress turned ride or die beard says he never loved me and that she does not find me sexually attractive.
“I can deal with that for reals.”
Hearing that an ex does not like or love us is hard. Hearing the statements their Flying Monkeys and people devoted to pleasing them as members of their Narcissistic Harem sucking up for social favors and access to prizes and special treatment make to dupe one another into believing someone their leader targets for abuse is somehow a person for them to fear or to mistreat without conscience themselves is at best frustrating as well as profoundly spiritually disappointing.
Hearing strangers who have been fed non-stop gaslighting by a pathological liar or by a pack of social racketeering toxic people is what it is… completely unnerving. Justifiably.
Sit with it!
Step one is figuring out what the social sphere of influence the smear campaigner actually has over the general public.
Step two is deciding if what they are claiming about you is accurate and something within your power to change — or if inaccurate to decide whether or not to feel shamed by whatever claim or insult they are hurling.
Step three is to determine whether or not to give the smear campaigner any form of social validation by granting them access to your time and attention. One can handle a rumor without needing to engage time physically speaking to or interacting with whoever started it or is spreading it in an attempt to net gain your attention while they dupe their listeners into thinking they are sharing accurate information with them about you as their in the moment obsession.
You see, accepting the criticism of a smear campaigner out of the gate, feeling the feels, and facing reality is incredibly liberating.
How many people does your ex-husband socially influence?
If he’s Bob the mechanic down at the local “GAY-rage”, his not liking you or not having anything nice to say about you to HIS contemporaries about you is not likely to be as socially and professionally or personally emotionally devastating to have to think about that, say, if you are Jim Acosta and the president of the United States just announced to the world that you are a terrible person, then blackmarked you in public for social harm after the global hospitality abuser gaslights and calls you the “Enemy of the State”.
If she’s only got power gossiping to strangers when she goes for a hair dye or mani-pedi at the local salon… or the most people she influences in life is her herd of cats, realize when she goes on a smear campaigning rant telling anyone and everyone willing to enable her to abuse all the reasons she claims that they — her actual social manipulation prey — should fear, mistrust, and totally dislike you…. understand what she claims about you does not matter as much as the fact that she’s taken the time to think about or to try to socially and emotionally harm you.
Realize what smear campaigning says about the person sharing caustic remarks, yes. But think even more about what the people who know that someone is behaving in an anti-social manner by freewill choice while they make the conscious moral decision to enable that person by giving them an audience.
Once you break the trauma bonding that keeps a body fearful to cut ties with a social group or to burn a bridge between themselves and known Cluster B people, healing from smear campaigning can commence.
In the case of a national or a global scandal, learning to stay in your own lane without deviating to strive to combat or to defend can save your health and long-term social reputation.
Rise above.
If the case is local — meaning likely to impact or to have a socially direct influence on under 5000 people — tend to assert the truth of who you are… not by bringing up the Smear Campaigner’s position ad infinitum to legitimize it by debating but by continuing without exception to be who you are.
We are all who we decide to be.
If your haters are talking about you, they are thinking about you. If they are thinking about you, understand they are trapped in a cycle of emotional and social enmeshment with you based upon their own toxic and co-dependent mindsets.
If you are a good person — keep being a good person.
If you are healing from abuse — keep healing.
If you are a prospective Whistleblower and the people likely to be most directly impacted by you telling the truth are trying to invalidate your social credibility while doing and saying whatever it takes to trick people into mistrusting or socially backing away from you… understand what you are seeing is WITNESS TAMPERING in action.
Think that one through carefully before personalizing any hateful things they daydream up to get under your skin or to socially dehumanize you.
If someone has an agenda to, say, use a Social Predator like a means — not like an ends… they are likely to do or say whatever it takes to ensure that person is able to provide for them in some way.
Think about the Golden Child who enables a toxic parent or toxic grandparent to abuse and neglect other family members or a targeted non-complicit relative. If they are lining up to inherit or to net gain something like continued access to cash by keeping the Alpha predator’s secrets for them… understand when they lie and claim things like you were never abused or neglected during your marriage or childhood by the problem person based on that person’s word that they are the most socially dangerous person to lend a subjective opinion about you in your world.
Going low to no contact socially and intellectually with anyone who associates with an Abuser without needing to feel malice towards those people when we do is essential self-care to recover from the profound health-destroying impact of being the target of rumor mongers.
If someone lies once to or about you or “tolerates” someone who uses words and a mix of gaslighting and ad hominem abuse tactics to harm as well as to emotionally bait others, give yourself permission to tell them politely if necessary to have their own personal equivalent of a nice day elsewhere.
Then, grieve the loss of all the relationships they harmed by triangulating you from other human beings.
Letting people who are not socially trustworthy from this moment forward be people who you used to know is a wonderful way to allow yourself the right to set and enforce healthy social and literal earwig avoiding inspired boundaries.
If you associate with people who are likely to come running to tell you that they were socializing with your Abuser and your Abuser said… or worse — people who associate with your Abuser and hide the contact from you… or if you chose to step into the metaphoric boxing ring to trade socially enmeshed jabs with a person or peer who is trolling to dominate your attention while they throw an energetic lasso around your emotional body while seeking to hold it indefinitely hostage… know you have made a free-will choice where to place your attention.
Seeing smear campaigns as things to take seriously as signs that someone else’s forensic psychology is deteriorating while escalating while striving to keep any earwigs or damaging graphic images used to dehumanize or to mock us depersonalized as much as is humanly possible is the most efficient way to handle the profoundly hurtful and upsetting fact that people who use words to mislead their own support network do so by choice with an intent to harm everybody.
If high EQ keeps the focus on the harm they aspire to do to us as their preferred scapegoats, we miss our own mark.
The goal of healing from a smear campaign is to become socially bulletproof and emotionally non-reactive to any bullying, shaming, or intended-to-be-deliberately-harmful remarks. Focusing on the reality that a Cluster B person knows full well what they are doing when they lie to and strive to gaslight their own Narcissistic Harem and Flying Monkey armies can help any smear campaign target realize their Abuser is simply showing everyone they know who they really are each time they say something that’s rude, manipulative, inaccurate, and or ugly can literally keep an abuse victim in touch with their own pro-social reality.
Just keep repeating the phrase, “Not my circus, not my monkeys…” to yourself whenever it comes to your attention that a Hospitality Abuser is attention-seeking or demanding by making false and deliberately abusive social claims about you in public.
Understand the more you allow what they claim to upset you, the more you reward them by allowing them to control your mind and your time while forcing themselves into your emotional body.
Is that a place where you are comfortable with them intercessing? If not, close porous boundaries, place the blah-blah-blah in proper civic and historical context and keep your focus on where your own mind, body, and thoughts are going in order to reclaim your time and control of your social and emotional life.
It’s going to turn out one way or another eventually. Process grief related to social and emotional feelings of betrayal one day at a time and realize we are all living in social bubbles we ourselves choose to socially, emotionally, and intellectually to define.
In our world people who smear campaign and who gaslight — using words to harm others while manufacturing chaos in society — are the problem. Not the people they choose to willfully malign.
Start there. And, if you spiral down the toxic shame spiral the social predators are seeking to provoke you to do… process the emotional upset and strive to depersonalize and to avoid reacting to them tomorrow.
Today, keep your focus on processing your raw emotions about being smeared without striving to alleviate feelings of shame or of pain. Use the lesson as a way to self-reflect and to re-frame any toxic NLP you were socially groomed to believe… like being told that everyone’s personal opinion matters to the collective when in all practical reality (aside from how ideas impact the behavior of an individual) it truly doesn’t.
What matters is reality.
The reality is about who you are and about why a social predator or pack of socially competitive and self-aggrandizing people are trying to make others mistreat you. That’s what matters…. not what someone with a Machiavellian intent to leave targeted listeners or readers with a false impression of you so they can somehow feel powerful and in control of other human’s thoughts and emotions by tricking them into abusing other human beings by proxy in order to win the Hospitality Abuser’s social approval and perks for “loyal” (meaning complicit) behavior.
What are they saying about you?
Does their opinion about you actually matter?
If yes — why. If no, GIGO.
