Showing posts with label Gaslighting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaslighting. Show all posts

Tuesday 14 November 2017

How The Malignant Narcissist Tries To Systematically Destroy You, Through The System





Being publically accused of a crime one did not commit could lead a person to jump off a bridge. Once the information is out there, defending yourself, clearing your name, fighting suspicion and tolerating disdain is a horrible predicament.  

Facing a criminal investigation or prosecution is deeply unsettling. Most people find they can’t sleep at night. They worry continually about what will happen to them. They feel that they stand alone — against the police and the Crown prosecutor and the machinery of the criminal justice system. There are few things in life so stressful and upsetting.

People in positions of authority can form strong opinions with false information and take unwarranted retaliatory action from expulsion from the clan to spreading the false word. In Jane Eyre, the cruel headmaster tells the girls to let no one be her friend, take her hand or comfort her. You get the sense that this is the worst for Jane, worse than the head blow and the lack of bread.

If the accusations are not true, the person is in a situation that is similar to being bullied. Even if one is rich, successful, famous or “has it all,” the psychological devastation can be ruinous. If you are not believed, if you cannot fight back with the true story, if now you are distrusted and under scrutiny, the sense of helplessness is overwhelming. People with inner vulnerabilities are easy targets. Others sense the fragility and find it thrilling to gang up or attack. Having a scapegoat can help a group form a strong bond and find meaning in what could be otherwise empty lives.

It is widely known that people with certain kinds of pathology are brilliant at looking like victims when they are actually perpetrators. They can ruin the life of an innocent person. You can see this on Law and Order, learn it in Psych 101 or know it instinctively.

When you hear a story, consider the narrator. Who is this person? Why is she telling this story when she is? What feelings does she convey when she tells it? If there was true victimization, then the wish to retaliate is utterly understandable. You as the listener may feel like crying too. But what if the true story is not as it seems? You might have a strange lack of empathy. Sometimes people dramatize. Some lie or they feel so injured for rational or irrational reasons that they come to believe their own distortions. There are those who are at peace when they lie and those who toss, turn and torture themselves about doing so. In short, some people lie and some do not.

You might wonder as you listen, is this person truly seeking wellness, self-protection or justice or is the goal to destroy someone else? If a person is lying to hurt someone else it is a very aggressive act and the accuser needs help. Such choices do not foster a healthy existence with generous, loving relationships.

You might hear a tale of woe, and just have the feeling that the teller is not all that woeful. Maybe there is a need to blame or malign for secondary gain: attention, fame, money, importance or drama. Maybe the person is not in touch with reality and is retaliating against an imagined transgression. Some seemingly intact people can have paranoid fears at the core. In order to “defend” themselves they act against others. Maybe the goal is to take someone else down for competitive, regressed, or even unconscious reasons. They just want what the other one has.

Making a false accusation in a public way is an aggressive act. In the movie The Bad Seed, a sociopathic child has an angelic demeanor and manages to destroy many lives. Sweet faces, soft voices and tears can hide sadistic impulses.

Source: Psychology Today

Thursday 13 July 2017

Creepy Smear Campaigns



 
If you're a big shot [or think you are], there are many ways to deal with criticism: You can address it with counterarguments, you can use it to improve yourself, you can ignore it ... or you can spend inordinate amounts of time and/or money trying to nuke the reputation of your critics in the hopes that it will make people stop listening to them.

This is about the people who go for that last option. But sometimes they end up throwing so much shit in the wind that it flies right back in their faces. Like when ...

Church of Scientology Forged a Bomb Threat to Smear a Journalist

If you ever start feeling sorry for those poor Scientologists because everyone picks on them, just remember the time they had a journalist indicted on fake terrorism charges because she wrote a book that painted them in a bad light. If you think we're being unfair, well, let's run through the details.

Starting in 1969, journalist Paulette Cooper published a number of damning exposes on the church and its founder, sci-fi writer turned messiah L. Ron Hubbard, including a book called The Scandal of Scientology, which detailed the psychological methods used to keep the church's followers (and, more importantly, their money) in line. The church tried to sue Cooper to shut her up several times, but none of the lawsuits took off, mainly because they couldn't prove that she had just pulled her book out of her ass like they claimed.

So, they moved to the next step: "Operation Freakout," an organized campaign to have Cooper "incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks" (that's a direct quote from a real church document). Besides writing her phone number on bathroom walls and sending anonymous smear letters to her family members and neighbors, the Scientologists actually infiltrated Cooper's life by having agents pose as friends -- one supposed friend reported that Cooper was close to suicide after all the harassment, adding, "Wouldn't that be great for Scientology?"

But the lowest moment came when church members mailed themselves bomb threats and told the police that Cooper had sent them. Cooper agreed to have her fingerprints taken by the cops, not too worried by the laughably transparent attempt to have her arrested ... only to find out that her prints were actually on the threatening letters, and that the stationery had come from her house (courtesy of the infiltrators). This resulted in some very real federal charges for conspiracy to commit terrorism, which turned Cooper's life into a living hell until the charges were finally dismissed two years later.
Documents seized in an FBI raid of a Scientology office in 1977 revealed all of this and more: The Scientologists had also planned to frame Cooper for threatening President Ford and Henry Kissinger. Oh, and according to a former member, at one point they even planned to murder her. At which point presumably somebody stood up and said, "Whoa, we'd better not do that or else we'll look like assholes."

General Motors Laid Out Hooker Traps for Ralph Nader

After spending most of the 1930s killing the electric streetcar and conspiring to install a fascist dictatorship in America, by the 1960s General Motors had moved on to more constructive things -- like building criminally unsafe cars with total impunity. When some guy called Ralph Nader came along and ruined the party for GM, the company decided to dig up dirt on Nader to discredit him ... and when they couldn't find any shameful secrets in his past, they figured they'd help him create some. With hookers.

The higher-ups at General Motors found themselves facing a wave of scrutiny after Nader's most famous book, Unsafe at Any Speed, was published. The book is a scandalous look into the safety record of the automobile industry, and it exposed GM's 1960 Chevrolet Corvair as the murder machine that it was. Rather than take Nader's advice to heart and create cars that didn't unnecessarily kill people, GM came up with a solution that to them made a lot more sense: If they proved that Nader was a pervert or a homosexual, obviously everyone would forget about the whole "My car could kill me at any moment" thing and continue buying unsafe vehicles.

And so, GM hired private detectives to follow Nader around and catch him in some kind of unscrupulous act, only to discover that he was perfectly clean (17 detectives died of boredom during the stakeouts). Still, GM was determined to get something on the guy, even if they had to fabricate it. Nader was able to confirm, years after GM's crusade, that the company had greenlit a plan to hire comely prostitutes to throw themselves at him in the hopes that his raw animal lust would kick in and cause him to give himself over to them. Thankfully, his extreme dullness prevailed and the plan failed.

GM's plans were revealed when the taped conversations of one of the detectives with GM higher-ups became public. Eventually, the company's president was forced to apologize to Nader for the invasion of privacy. We kinda hope Nader becomes president one day just so he can harass them with an army of hookers. See if they like it.