Author: Invah

via Becca Lauren, comment to Instagram (excerpted)

Their weaponizing your own empathy against you means you have to, within yourself, shift your empathy from ’emotional empathy’ to ‘cognitive empathy’.

Emotional empathy, for example, has you bailing out your loved one because you ‘know what a hard time they’ve had’, whereas cognitive empathy has you recognizing that they need boundaries/consequences for their choices in order to stop the cycle of damage they create, and therefore understanding that in this instance jail is the right place for them.

Groups tend to organize around a weakness.

When a group experiences a threat, they’re apt to circle the wagons. Group cohesion becomes the most important goal. This instinct to come together with others when we’re feeling anxious and uncertain can be healthy in moderation.

But according to Friedman, the herding instinct becomes dysfunctional when togetherness becomes an end in and of itself, rather than a means to group and individual flourishing.

In fact, making unity the sole aim often jettisons the potential for the majority of a group to flourish for the sake of appeasing a minority of the group’s least mature and most troublesome members.

You see this play out in dysfunctional families.

Take the family with an alcoholic mom. Instead of telling Mom to get into rehab and get counseling to sort herself out, all the other family members begin to organize their lives around Mom’s problem. The kids walk on eggshells to ensure she doesn’t get stressed or anxious, because when Mom gets stressed and anxious, she starts to drink. Family members don’t share their problems with her and try to solve issues before she’s even aware of them, so she doesn’t start spiraling.

Telling Mom she needs to get her life together is hard and painful — it takes nerve.

Hence, family members instead choose to contort themselves into psychological and emotional knots to ensure everything stays copacetic so that Mom doesn’t get upset. They sacrifice their own well-being, not even to make things good, but to keep them from going bad.

Families that organize around a weakness remind me of The Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life.”

A little boy named Anthony Freemont can kill anyone just by thinking it. He usually knocks someone off when that person does something that makes him unhappy. His family (and the whole community as well) is naturally terrified of Anthony, so they constantly tiptoe around, trying to keep him happy. They have to pretend he’s a good boy, even when he acts like a monster. They’ve organized themselves around a weakness: Anthony.

You see this same dysfunctional dynamic in groups outside of families.

Instead of firing toxic and incompetent employees (which would be hard and painful), many workplaces will just figure out a way to organize themselves so that these people do the least damage.

But that doesn’t solve the problem, and the group continues to suffer as a whole.

Or think about a church group where the most annoying and emotionally immature person effectively takes the congregation hostage. This individual complains about the dumbest things and takes extreme offense at minor slights. Instead of telling this member to shape up or ship out, the pastor or the other members of the group, who think of themselves as “nice Christian guys,” try to be “compassionate” and “empathetic” and lovingly reason with the person.

But this person can’t be reasoned with.

They’re emotionally unhealthy. There’s a good chance they’ll take advantage of your empathy and reasoning by weaponizing it and turning it back against you.

“Isn’t it the Christian thing to do to help me?! What would Jesus do, brother?”

Friedman doesn’t have a problem with empathy and compassion. He was a rabbi and family counselor, after all. Being empathetic and compassionate was part of the gig.

He just had an issue with “unbounded empathy.”

You need to combine empathy with reason. When you try to be empathetic with someone who’s emotionally unhealthy, you can end up being un-empathetic to everyone else; in changing the group’s structure or culture to accommodate the demands of a vocal minority, you can sabotage the group’s ability to meet the needs of the majority.

Friedman also doesn’t necessarily have a problem with families or groups organizing around a weakness, as long as it’s done for a healthy purpose.

Think of a family in which one of the family members has cancer. That’s a weakness, so it’s good and natural that a family comes together to help that family member out. Schedules will need to be rearranged so that oncology appointments can be attended. Other family members may need to pick up some slack in terms of chores.

But in a healthy family, weakness doesn’t become the main event.

They’ll still seek to make life as “normal” as possible for everyone else. Group togetherness is a means to an end: the family and its individual members living a flourishing life.

Think of the herding instinct as an immune response.

In a healthy organism, the immune response is calibrated so that when the body is sick, it kicks into gear at the right time and intensity so that it only kills the outside pathogen while doing as little damage to the body as possible. That’s what healthy herding looks like.

Unhealthy herding is like an autoimmune disease in which the immune system is constantly firing and damaging the body and making it sicker.

The cure becomes deadlier than the disease.

–Brett and Kate McKay, excerpted from The 5 Characteristics of Highly Dysfunctional Groups

When you say “no” about something you get to say “no” about (such as yourself, your body, your resources, your space) and the other person ignores it? Overrides it? Tries to coerce you against it?

That person is showing that they do not respect you.

They do not respect your ability to make decisions for yourself and your things.

They do not respect your boundaries.

This means they don’t even acknowledge your boundaries.
They don’t honor that you even get to have boundaries.
They don’t support that you have the right to decide for yourself.
They don’t observe or recognize your decisions.

They do not respect you and do not want you to have power over yourself or your things.

High-conflict people try to psychologically dominate others into abandoning their own “no”. It’s important to understand that these people do not respect you at all, it doesn’t matter what your relationship with them is.

One of the biggest struggles of having to parent with an abuser is that they will DARVO at your children.

They deny their abusing, they attack you, and they reverse victim and offender to convince your children together that you are the abusive person, that you are the reason for everything, and that you are a bad person.

This is actually an opportunity in disguise to teach your children critical thinking.

Most victim-parents (understandably, but ineffectually) respond with “wait, no they’re lying! they were abusive, not me!” Sometimes they discuss the details of each situation – with receipts! – to prove their case.

This only lasts while they are with you.

Every way the abusive parent confused you about the abuse when you were together is now being used on your children to confuse them about who the abuser is, and to convince them it was you.

Instead of reacting like you’re the defendant in a case, you need to switch to teacher mode.

You are changing the paradigm and your position in it. You don’t need to ‘defend yourself’, you need to teach your child. It’s important to remember that the truth is still the truth regardless, reality is still reality.

A good place to start is the foundation you have already built for teaching them to be a good person.

• We use gentle hands, not angry hands.
• We respect people’s no about their bodies.
• We respect people’s no around their things.
• We keep our hands and feet to ourselves.
• If we can’t be safe, we go home.
• If we can’t be safe, we go somewhere safe.
• When you choose to be safe, I can trust you with more.
• We don’t play with friends who hurt us.
• Clean up, clean up, everybody does their share; clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere.
• We use “please” and “thank you” to show we respect each other.
• Respect is treating people and things that matter like they matter, and disrespect is treating things and people that matter like they don’t matter. (credit u/dankoblamo)
• We use our inside voice.
• It’s okay to make mistakes, it’s not okay to lie about them.
• When we lie, we break our words because people can’t trust them.
• When you cheat, you’re cheating yourself.
• Actions have consequences.
• Let’s make good choices.

It’s vitally important to be a parent who follows these rules.

To be a parent who treats your kids with respect, who doesn’t use ‘angry hands’, who doesn’t lie to them, who is a safe person with them, who doesn’t yell, who doesn’t break their things, but who does give reasonable and consistent consequences for their actions.

I personally never lie to my son.

He needs to know on a core level that he can trust what I say. And so when I have in the past caught him lying about something, I show him (via the Socratic method) that he can trust what I tell him 100% and then I contrast that with how I don’t have the same assurance that what he tells me is the truth. And we talk about opportunities for him to re-build that trust with me.

These concepts are an on-going conversation, that you can then use to scaffold issues with the adverse parent.

So when he was little-little and his father was still actively being abusive, and we separated, I phrased it to my son that “Your father’s not making his best choices right now, and these boundaries help him be a safe person.”

Kids understand about ‘being a safe person’ and ‘helping people be safe’.

It’s been an ongoing conversation for them, and in a teaching manner (versus “you’re bad!”) and so they can understand that a parent might not be ‘making good choices’ and ‘needs help to be safe’. That we don’t stay and play with someone who isn’t making good choices, and who hurts us.

The next step is to then talk to the child (in an age-appropriate way) from the bird’s eye view of the situation.

For example, [kid describes mommy/daddy saying that mommy/daddy ‘broke up the family’.]

I’m going right into teacher mode:

If your friend punches you in the face and you don’t want to be friends with him any more, who ‘broke up the friendship’?

If they punch you in the face, are they being your friend?

Of course not – if they punch you in the face, they aren’t being your friend so there isn’t a friendship. Them not being safe, them not treating you like a friend, means there is no friendship.

So your mother/father and I chose to be family, and we choose to be family when we treat each other as family.

If your mother/father doesn’t make safe choices, and they aren’t treating me or you as their family, then who is ‘breaking the family’?

The underlying idea, really, is that people get to make choices for themselves but those choices also have consequences.

Abusers want to make unsafe choices but not experience the natural consequence of those unsafe choices, which is that you don’t want to be around them. Abuse is various ways to convince you that they should not experience the consequences of their actions.

That’s basically The Narcissist’s Prayer by Dayna Craig:

That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did…
You deserved it.

So when your adverse parent lies to your child, saying that you [did thing], remember, you are not the defendant.

And you are discussing both the immediate situation as well as having a meta discussion about it.

Because the child is trying to figure out ‘who is telling the truth’.

And that’s tricky. Because people can believe something that isn’t true. They aren’t ‘lying’ even if they are wrong. And they may believe different things depending on how they feel, it’s called “state-specific beliefs”. So, an unstable person may think one way when they are happy, but think another when they are upset.

So the adverse parent might not being ‘lying’ to the child

…and a young child ‘feels’ like they’re truthful. And your child comes to talk to you, and feels like you’re being truthful, and now they’re confused. They turn into a detective trying to figure out the truth. But their job is to be a kid, not make determinations of fact between adults.

You want to help them with the difference between ‘trying to figure out who’s telling the truth’ and understanding reality.

And the reality that they need to be most concerned with is who is being a safe grown up. Who is making safe choices.

Who is respecting boundaries.

Even if it is confusing about who did what, you can look at how people are handling the issue to see who is safe and who isn’t. The unsafe person usually tells on themselves because even still they are trying to control what people think and feel.

You begin to realize that disagreements aren’t attacks, lacking boundaries isn’t empathy, and not amount of external validation can replace self-love.

Trauma bonding isn’t healing, ignoring your needs isn’t strength, people-pleasing isn’t kindness, staying in toxic situations isn’t loyalty, numbing your emotions isn’t coping, and suppressing emotions or staying silent doesn’t bring peace.

–mindtendencies2

“We cannot deny that some people are excessively keen on rebuilding their lives in the exact same places that took them away…” – u/GeneraleArmando

Excerpted from a comment about how people can be so focused on rebuilding in disaster-prone areas, and I realized that this is what adult victims of abuse often do with the abusive partner: keep trying to rebuild over and over and over.

The utter sense of déjà vu I experienced while reading America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters

(written before Hurricane Milton jumped up to ‘once in a lifetime’ levels):

The United States is trapped in a cycle of disasters bigger than the ones our systems were built for. Before Hurricane Helene made landfall late last month, FEMA was already running short on funds; now, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, told reporters on Wednesday, if another hurricane hits, it will run out altogether. At the same time, the Biden administration has announced that local expenses to fix hurricane damage in several of the worst-affected states will be completely reimbursed by the federal government.

This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense. Over time, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on disasters in an ad hoc way, outside its main disaster budget, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School.

Whenever you talk to victims of abuse who haven’t quite grasped the danger they are in, it’s usually because they are looking backward – to the beginning of the relationship, or to past incidents – and their tolerance for abuse ‘is calculated to past events’.

They don’t believe the abuser will escalate, they aren’t extrapolating out the pattern of the abuser’s behavior over a longer term, they don’t see the escalation of behavior or in the increase of individual incidences.

This is what it means to be ‘a frog in a boiling pot of water’.

You can’t put the frog in the boiling water, it will jump out, you have to increase the temperature slowly so that the frog stays: it acclimates.

And I think victims of abuse ‘acclimate’ in large part because they are ‘predicting’ that since the water has only ever been warm, it will never boil; or they can’t even conceive of it boiling.

For a victim of abuse, they abuser was ‘just having a bad day’, or ‘things have been tough’, or the relationship ‘has lots of ups and downs’, or they’re just really ‘passionate’, or ‘they had a tough childhood’, etc.

None of these ways of thinking about the abuser or the relationship see it from the perspective of someone being unsafe. And for some, they don’t see it as unsafe because unsafe things haven’t happened…yet.

But when victim resources talk about paying attention to whether someone respects your boundaries, respects your no, is controlling or not controlling – these are the ‘outer bands’ that presage disaster if you don’t leave.

(For example, people who are controlling, even if they are ‘only controlling because they’re anxious’, it’s never enough. You can never give this person enough control for them to be satisfied. In fact, once you give them total control, they’ll often say that the victim ‘isn’t the same person’ anymore.)

As Zoë Schlanger said in her article on disaster preparedness, exceptional circumstances, too often repeated, cease to be exceptions.

From the article by Arash Emamzadeh:

• My partner acted arrogant or entitled.
• My partner and I disagreed about something sexual.
• My partner and I had sex, even though I was not in the mood.
• My partner created an uncomfortable situation in public.
• My partner disregarded my reasoning or logic because it did not agree with theirs.
• My partner reacted negatively when I said no to something they wanted.
• My partner resented being questioned about how they treat me.

Note that predicting future violence depended not only on the number of warning signs but also on their frequency.