We are blind to the consequences of these behaviors in our daily life!
The Donald is dangerous. We are in danger. We have a sociopath driving the bus, that is this nation, and no one near him with the power to influence him. The problem is that one of the characteristics of a sociopath is a complete breach of reality. This breach acts like the memory removal tool used in the movie “Men in Black”. Trumps leadership style, his mechanism of influence is the use of invalidation and power and control. Specifically, one of the most powerful aspects of power and control is minimize, deny and blame. Trump has taught us just how effective this tool can be. We need to understand the powerful mechanism of invalidation so that we can fight back. Many of us have been indoctrinated by it. It is a paradigm. It is a way of interacting with others. It is an interpersonal “style” that leads to violence. The use of power and control uses the energy created by the emotions of fear and shame in order to manipulate and influence others, while simultaneously disrupting the trust of our own perceptions. It's important to understand how this mechanism works if we hope to change it.
First of all, fear and shame are energy in our body that creates action urges. Emotions are used as short cuts to movement and influence when there is no time to analyze or think through a behavior. Emotions are generated in the most primitive part of the brain. The action urge that goes with fear is to avoid. The action urge that goes with shame is to hide. This is precisely why it's used by despots. If you are afraid, you will avoid getting too close to me. If you are ashamed you will hide from me. Both of these emotions serve to deflect confrontation.
Add to the powerful use of fear and shame, the power of invalidation, a component of power and control, and you have a tool that can serve to deflect and erase the past. It literally disables our ability to hold someone else accountable. This combo is debilitating. This is a powerful tool that seeks to distort truth. The behavior of minimize, deny and blame, serves to blame the oppressed and serves quite literally to distort our relationship with reality. This one mechanism in the use of power and control can be considered one of the most powerful tools for perpetuating it. And as I make my argument, in this short blog and someday hopefully, in the book I hope to write, you will be able to see, that this style of behavior is destructive to humanity and mental health. In fact, we already have a study suggesting that we are being sickened by this behavior from our leadership. www.apa.org/... Its not enough that we become sensitive to violence but that we understand that violence causes invalidation. It affects us and changes our relationship with truth, ourselves and our perceptions. We are blind to these behaviors because one of its mechanisms literally causes blindness or denial. (www.google.com/...)
The power wheel was originally developed by a team of people in Duluth Minnesota who were treating survivors and perpetrators of domestic violence. (www.google.com/...) The original power wheel was more sexist in that it began as a way to explain why men were violent towards women. Of course as time has gone on it has become clear that power and control can be used by anyone and likely exists in all of us. What the founding fathers did was, create a new set of rules or ways of behaving, meant to offset the tyranny or power and control of the imperialistic England. But because we did not truly understand these mechanisms and because we are still in denial and perpetuating them, we have difficulty, parsing out what the founding fathers were so effectively fighting against. The USA became imperialistic and used the same paradigm to build its power base. As we fought against power and control, we used power and control to grow our nation. We used power and control against the American Indians, Mexicans and hispanics, eskimos, native people. We used power and control to build wealth through slavery and labor. We used children and women. We as a nation minimize, deny and blame the victims of violence in our history. We deny that much of our wealth came from using power and control over the American Indians, then slaves, women, children, and today labor. We continue blindly to use power and control in schools, corporations and we are blindly perpetuating it's use all over the world. Quite frankly, the saying “if you live by the sword, you die by the sword” has validity. Because we use power and control so frequently to discipline children, to punish prisoners, against prisoners of war, and in our military and police forces, we are often blind to its dynamics. This is dangerous indeed.
People who have been unapologetically (invalidated) shaped by the forces of power and control, the use of fear and shame, are often the least likely to understand it's negative consequences. Power and control deflects us, keeps us from confronting a conflict in perception, keeps us from trusting and acting on our perception. Basically power and control creates followers. It creates sycophants, it separates us from our own perception of truth and underminds our sense of self and our trust in perception. It creates a pressure causing us to want to avoid or hide, creating the feeling that we don't have time to cognitively and more scientifically evaluate. Alcoholics in their disease live in a perpetual state of emotion mind, judgments, biases and theory as alcohol shuts down the frontal lobe and lights up the emotions. All of these issues join together and keep us from seeing what is in front of us. It is truly the frog in the pot on the stove.
The following are the behaviors of power and control that lead to violence:
Using Intimidation: Using fear created by size, show of force, yelling, slamming fists, angry tone, glares, show of weapons, weapons build up.
Using Mind Games: Attempts to undermine and destroy the personal power, self esteem, self perception, to cause someone to question their own legitimacy or validity in general. Gaslighting, comparisons, name calling, criticism, embarrassing, shaming, put downs.
Using Isolation: Isolating groups of people from the realities of each other. Isolating people from each other. Using silent treatment, shunning, preventing access to one and other. Examples of this would be children not allowed to play with others, children chained in rooms, people not allowed to socialize with others, separating slaves from each other, jails, internment camps. This is an attempt to keep secrets and contain valid reports being shared and validated. It's to interrupt the flow of communication and interaction.
Minimize, Deny and Blame: (memory, truth, removal tool) This may be one of the most powerful tools. This behavior more completely causes people to doubt their own experience of pain or oppression. It makes people question their own emotional experience. It disconnects a human being from themselves. It is specific to the insult or pain caused by insult or injury.
Minimize: This is to say “You are fine, it didn't hurt that bad, you are over-
Reacting. You are wrong to feel the way you do”.
Deny: This is to say, “It didn't happen. You are lying. You are wrong”.
Blame: This is to say, “It's your fault. You made me do it. You deserved it”.
Treating People as Objects: Sexism, racism. Treating people according to roles. Men as tools, women as sex objects, children as laborers, human trafficking, children as spies, or used to lie or create a front. Treating a human as if that human is not a sentient being with rights and valid emotion and worth. “I can touch you if I want, force you to work against your will, not keep you safe, use you, put you in harms way, ignore you, deny you your rights”. I can treat you as less than human. (Immigrants, prostitutes, children, laborers)
Using Authority: Using authority, to deny the message, perception, voice of another. The idea that “I am the boss and can do what I want”. This is the idea, because “I said so..."
Economics: This is using money, taxes, fines to disable the power of another. Banks, taxation, fines, salaries, and jobs to control the behavior of others. Examples of this would be welfare debit cards, predatory loans, denying access to money jobs or education.
Coercion and Threats: Threatening to sue, put people in jail, turn them in, hit or punish, threatening to hurt someone to scare them into or out of behavior.
As as you can see, these behaviors are easily observed in parenting behavior, basic training, within marriages, class rooms, college campuses, police forces. These are the behaviors of brain washing, suppression, and oppression.
One of the most important aspects of the power behind this combination of behavior is that it literally brain washes us to pay more attention to external voices instead of our own. These behaviors brain wash us to minimize the real violence in our lives. It serves to blind us to the mechanism of truth that would stop it. Invalidation, is the failure to recognize the validity behind our own emotional experiences. Emotions are currents of energy. When we are in tune with our perceptual system, feeling our emotions, balancing them with our truth detector brain, we are in tune with each other and the universe. Our emotions were created to serve us to fight, to protect, to hunt, to save. The more that invalidation exists, the more vulnerable we are to outside leadership. The more we doubt our inner experience. The more easily, we can be swayed or controlled by others.
Our history, is full of power and control. But interestingly, we minimize, deny and blame as a society. This shows us that we have internalized this mechanism. We have internalized, the memory removal tool. It’s important to recognize that this is part of why some of us, “see” the pain of power and control and some of us don't. If the shame and fear were never validated at all, then we become unable to validate our own emotions, which then interferes with our ability to validate the pain of others. One research study suggests that the difference between Trump supporters and non Trump supporters is authoritarianism. www.politico.com/...
When invalidation is present, there are symptoms. These symptoms can become “cultural”. Institutionalized. The symptoms of invalidation are the following: (according to Marsha Linehan, creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, DBT.behavioraltech.org/...).
1) The inability to recognize and regulate emotions. At polar ends are sociopathy and psychopathy, with hysteria and extreme dependency on the other end in a circular continuum. (Depression, mood disorders, bi polar, anxiety)
2) Relationship dysfunction. If you cannot regulate emotion, it will affect relationship and connection. Depression isolates, rage separates, love connects, joy connects, compassion helps us grow tolerance and solutions for all. We are hard wired to be able to make these types of solutions but power and control disrupts this system and destroys this paradigm. This paradigm requires a connection to emotion, compassion, and the ability to balance emotion with truth.
3) Compulsive behaviors. When our relationship to our own emotions is disrupted, we go outside ourselves to find ways to regulate emotions. Compulsion replace emotion regulation. Addictions to food, sex, drugs, and money replace emotion regulation. These compulsions only separate us further from ourselves.
4) Cognitive distortions. Dichotomous thinking. Black and white thinking replace curiousity and interest, passion and learning. There is no joy connected to curiousity because this is an emotion. Curiousity is replaced with fear. Structures for truth replace consciousness, a connection to now. Ideals and rules replace decision making and balance.
5) Dysregulation of self. This is an existence ruled by fear, unconscious emotion, a disconnect with truth, and a lack of self awareness and self regulation.
When you consider or contemplate the above symptoms of invalidation, you can see perhaps, that these symptoms are valid across all of humanity. Power and control destroys our relationship to ourselves. It disempowers us. It destroys us from the inside. Invalidation is the tool of Putin.
We will cease to be effective if we are unable to use our emotions as a guide. Let me make clear, that emotions must be regulated and woven with truth. The most effective map makers, are the ones who have learned to use emotion effectively, not by denying emotion but using it to connect. Nor are we to use emotion as if it represents truth or fact. We as humans must balance our emotions with our perceptual system, but it is one way we gather information about the world, and most importantly, emotion is the glue that connects us together. Emotions are a powerful force. The use of power and control literally disrupts our ability to connect and to know what is valid.
The only weapon against power and control is speaking truth to power. Truth will set us free. We have to live out of the truth and behave in relationship to the truth. Listen for messages of minimize, deny and blame. Confront this behavior, label it, understand it as an attempt to deflect reality and accountability. Do not allow yourself to be sucked in to its power.
