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Due to the complexity of the issue, I separated my own thoughts on the matter into two comments. Also, simple as the question is, no single answer can be ever sufficient. Thus, I do admit I have an answer, but there is no way that answer can be enough to constitute a solution.
I have some experience I am willing to share, however, and from these experiences I have reached my own conclusions. Each reply approaches the issue from a slightly different direction. Even so they do make up a whole of what I want to convey regarding this difficult topic.
Personally, I would be suspicious of anyone brandishing a victory “I have it!” banner. Nevertheless, experience is invaluable and I hope my two essays have constructive impact.
What you describe is a textbook case, as far as I am concerned. Lobaczewski says that we need to approach psychopathy from a scientific perspective, in terms of biology. I believe, however, that the current scientific paradigm (greatly influenced by the pathocratic establishment) needs to be expanded for such an approach to be effective, and that the approach needs to involve experience outside of controlled laboratory-like conditions. Life is the laboratory in this case.
It is noteworthy that Lobaczewski was connected to your experience, occurring at the same time as Durand’s constant rants, which provided the opportunity of the basic question to be presented here. It’s like the question itself is the result of a convergence of synchronistic patterns.
I "affectionately" call psychopathic individuals "characters" (as in caricatures) and discovered that they fall into distinct categories with respect to energy centre dominance. I found that “victims” attract different types of psychopaths, whose dominance corresponds to the weakest energy centres of the victim.
Regardless of type, one can distinguish a common psychopathic strategy involving three stages:
The first is the beguiling or seduction stage. It is like the shimmer in the spider web that attracts flying insects, or the aroma of carnivorous plants. The tactics involving this stage are many, but all play upon the need to share aspirations and experience and find common ground. Like any contagion, early treatment is easiest if the miasma is identified. Two things hinder us from identifying the psychopath at this early stage: one is inexperience and the other is weakness and lack of coherence in the emotion body.
Experience can be gained, and part of it is a realization of one's own weaknesses, which the psychopath is a master at identifying and manipulating. I found that this manipulation has a hidden purpose. It pushes us to misunderstand ourselves and judge weakness and lack of inner coherence as something that needs to be excised. Thus, the psychopath tries to make us like him or herself from the onset by first superimposing themselves over our energy body through an identification with our aspirations, and then twist our own sense of right into his psychotic direction. Eventually, when our own blurred sense of empathy becomes misconstrued as pity and then as self-pity, we may end up with a heart of stone just to stop the turmoil.
I am, however, getting ahead of myself. The point is there are two more stages of psychopathic attack after this. To be able to gain a clear sense of self and the necessary experience to identify the "happy face" mask of the psychopath for what it is, we may have to run the gauntlet of these stages more than once (although the whole purpose of understanding is to spare us this unnecessary suffering).
The second stage is where the proboscis of the psychopath enters our energy field and tests the quality of our flesh, as it were. They try to take up our time, and especially our energy. There is always an implied warning given by the psychopath through some subconscious pathway at this phase that we had better cater to them "or else". When the psychopath senses that we are sufficiently intimidated they drop the mask and move into the third stage, which is domination (either overt or passive through making themselves the centre of our lives).
If we recoil from the probing proboscis, the psychopath will still drop the mask, and attempt to induce paralysis usually through two avenues of approach applied either separate or in coincidence. These are confusion and guilt. They attack, in other words, our convictions and our empathy, both basic soul qualities. I should note that I believe that to the psychopath, the soul or living psyche and its divine potential is the enemy because it negates his or her existence by its very presence. To the psychopath the soul (which is often more tangible than to those in which it resides) is an existential threat, sort of like blasphemy to the psychopathic way. Thus, the psychopath undermines soul qualities rooted in sincere conviction (inner truth) and empathy/compassion/understanding.
I have summarized this in two sentences uttered by psychopaths: 1) "Are you sure?" and 2) "You're hurting me/others/everyone". I mentioned that one point of vulnerability is lack of inner coherence. What I mean by this is not so much the existence of emotional scars or trauma residues, but a lack of a needed degree of clarity regarding those. We are all human and none of us are "pure" whatever that means, and most of us still carry residues of pain accumulated through the simple act of living in this world as it stands.
Like that of a predatory insect with evolutionary adaptations the psychotic's proboscis knows how to probe for these areas where we doubt ourselves even though we may have forgotten them, or have learned to live with them. The proboscis is very good at seeking out tender flesh, where penetration is easier. If it cannot dominate and consume us it will try to move us to deny our soul qualities, whether through denial of our convictions and inner truths or denial of our capacity to empathize with ourselves as well as others.
I have adopted the insect analogy (the buzzard analogy also fits) because I have allowed psychotics in my life to run close to the full cycle of their intent, just to prove to myself that I am not the perpetrator here. I have given the benefit of the doubt to the limits of my endurance. I have given to the point that arrogant psychopaths showed their true face, scoffing at my "weakness". Of course, in doing so, the fools threw away all pretences prematurely and disempowered their phase-two tactics. Triggering psychopaths early on often throws them off schedule and forces them to attack when the prey has not been sufficiently weakened.
I will not get into the third phase of domination because it is pretty obvious, as well as unpleasant. Most people who are in a position to build an immunity to psychopathic attack usually have gone through at least one or even more experiences of some kind of psychopathic domination or near-domination at some point in their lives. Certainly, the line between the second and third stage is blurred just as our sense of self becomes blurred as the psychopath feeds upon it.
Building immunity is akin to an organic process. There are no formulas or singular exercises. In our “cut to the chase” culture there is no chase to cut here. Like all organic processes it is gradual. Experience is always a great teacher, and as you have noted suffering through each cycle decreases each time. It is obviously more desirable, however, to attain immunity in a manner where we do not have to suffer for it.
I have noticed our friend Durand used phrases such as "happy to have danced with you". I noticed such expressions in other psychopaths as well. It seems to me the psychopaths attempt to capitalize on our need to gain through experience, by rigging the experiences of learning as just another strategy to keep themselves in proximity. Normal people feel drained by the conflict, while the psychos are envigorated by it.
I have seen too much to consider that conventional psychology or even biology suffices to really get a clear understanding of psychopaths on the individual level of encounter if not the social one. I am convinced that emotional immunity to psychopaths is what we might call a collective frontier. And it is a frontier that has never been properly addressed in the past.
It is, furthermore, a delicate subject to address because it is intimately personal as well as common to ensouled humanity. The acute distress of emotional upheavals generate a "stop the pain reflex", which may bias the mind into believing that emotional discomfort is something to be avoided or inhibited at all costs. You have expressed as much in your writings, I believe.
Most of us find ourselves in seemingly endless cycles of confronting one psychopath after another. At first all we have is the psychotic gauntlet to teach us. Slowly we can learn to stop the snowball effect before domination overtakes us. Then we can cycle through the painful tactics of the psychotic and recover faster so as to confidently halt the cycle before the psychotic begins probing for weaknesses. Finally, we can spot them through pure psychic sense, and with undeniable conviction at that.
I believe psychotics have a sixth sense as it were, and can sense their prey and the weaknesses of their prey like any evolved predator. Thus, in my opinion, the key to immunity lies in the development of the energy body and in particular the emotional body. A predator is attracted to the weak and dysfunctional, the dying but not the dead or soul-inert. A living empowered energy and emotional body is something the psychotic cannot digest. In fact, the very probability of encountering psychotics can eventually be eliminated with such empowerment, centring upon the attained integrity of the emotional body, the primary feeding ground of psychotics.
In principle, the world population would split in two parts, with whole people on one end and psychotics on the other. As this would occur integrated humanity can move to address pertinent issues in a more coherent manner. First, thing’s first and we need to take things one step at a time in my view.
In the next section I attempt to focus more on directly answering the $60,000 question. In doing so wanted to avoid any kind of presentations of methodology, simply presenting a kind of general direction that can be explored.
I have some experience I am willing to share, however, and from these experiences I have reached my own conclusions. Each reply approaches the issue from a slightly different direction. Even so they do make up a whole of what I want to convey regarding this difficult topic.
Personally, I would be suspicious of anyone brandishing a victory “I have it!” banner. Nevertheless, experience is invaluable and I hope my two essays have constructive impact.
It's called compassion manipulated into despair. It is no wonder, considering the predictability of psychopathic strategies that we find that in many cultures the promotion of despair is the modus operandi of “evil”. As I mentioned, we can liken the tactics of the psychopath to those of a predatory spider or wasp paralyzing its prey before it feeds or makes it food for its young.Laura said:So, it seems that I'm pretty good with dealing with the intellectual side of it, but when the pity ploy comes along, I'm still the world's biggest sucker. The instant I think that someone has been hurt by me or by something I have done, even inadvertently, I am almost drowning in suffering.
What you describe is a textbook case, as far as I am concerned. Lobaczewski says that we need to approach psychopathy from a scientific perspective, in terms of biology. I believe, however, that the current scientific paradigm (greatly influenced by the pathocratic establishment) needs to be expanded for such an approach to be effective, and that the approach needs to involve experience outside of controlled laboratory-like conditions. Life is the laboratory in this case.
It is noteworthy that Lobaczewski was connected to your experience, occurring at the same time as Durand’s constant rants, which provided the opportunity of the basic question to be presented here. It’s like the question itself is the result of a convergence of synchronistic patterns.
I "affectionately" call psychopathic individuals "characters" (as in caricatures) and discovered that they fall into distinct categories with respect to energy centre dominance. I found that “victims” attract different types of psychopaths, whose dominance corresponds to the weakest energy centres of the victim.
Regardless of type, one can distinguish a common psychopathic strategy involving three stages:
The first is the beguiling or seduction stage. It is like the shimmer in the spider web that attracts flying insects, or the aroma of carnivorous plants. The tactics involving this stage are many, but all play upon the need to share aspirations and experience and find common ground. Like any contagion, early treatment is easiest if the miasma is identified. Two things hinder us from identifying the psychopath at this early stage: one is inexperience and the other is weakness and lack of coherence in the emotion body.
Experience can be gained, and part of it is a realization of one's own weaknesses, which the psychopath is a master at identifying and manipulating. I found that this manipulation has a hidden purpose. It pushes us to misunderstand ourselves and judge weakness and lack of inner coherence as something that needs to be excised. Thus, the psychopath tries to make us like him or herself from the onset by first superimposing themselves over our energy body through an identification with our aspirations, and then twist our own sense of right into his psychotic direction. Eventually, when our own blurred sense of empathy becomes misconstrued as pity and then as self-pity, we may end up with a heart of stone just to stop the turmoil.
I am, however, getting ahead of myself. The point is there are two more stages of psychopathic attack after this. To be able to gain a clear sense of self and the necessary experience to identify the "happy face" mask of the psychopath for what it is, we may have to run the gauntlet of these stages more than once (although the whole purpose of understanding is to spare us this unnecessary suffering).
The second stage is where the proboscis of the psychopath enters our energy field and tests the quality of our flesh, as it were. They try to take up our time, and especially our energy. There is always an implied warning given by the psychopath through some subconscious pathway at this phase that we had better cater to them "or else". When the psychopath senses that we are sufficiently intimidated they drop the mask and move into the third stage, which is domination (either overt or passive through making themselves the centre of our lives).
If we recoil from the probing proboscis, the psychopath will still drop the mask, and attempt to induce paralysis usually through two avenues of approach applied either separate or in coincidence. These are confusion and guilt. They attack, in other words, our convictions and our empathy, both basic soul qualities. I should note that I believe that to the psychopath, the soul or living psyche and its divine potential is the enemy because it negates his or her existence by its very presence. To the psychopath the soul (which is often more tangible than to those in which it resides) is an existential threat, sort of like blasphemy to the psychopathic way. Thus, the psychopath undermines soul qualities rooted in sincere conviction (inner truth) and empathy/compassion/understanding.
I have summarized this in two sentences uttered by psychopaths: 1) "Are you sure?" and 2) "You're hurting me/others/everyone". I mentioned that one point of vulnerability is lack of inner coherence. What I mean by this is not so much the existence of emotional scars or trauma residues, but a lack of a needed degree of clarity regarding those. We are all human and none of us are "pure" whatever that means, and most of us still carry residues of pain accumulated through the simple act of living in this world as it stands.
Like that of a predatory insect with evolutionary adaptations the psychotic's proboscis knows how to probe for these areas where we doubt ourselves even though we may have forgotten them, or have learned to live with them. The proboscis is very good at seeking out tender flesh, where penetration is easier. If it cannot dominate and consume us it will try to move us to deny our soul qualities, whether through denial of our convictions and inner truths or denial of our capacity to empathize with ourselves as well as others.
I have adopted the insect analogy (the buzzard analogy also fits) because I have allowed psychotics in my life to run close to the full cycle of their intent, just to prove to myself that I am not the perpetrator here. I have given the benefit of the doubt to the limits of my endurance. I have given to the point that arrogant psychopaths showed their true face, scoffing at my "weakness". Of course, in doing so, the fools threw away all pretences prematurely and disempowered their phase-two tactics. Triggering psychopaths early on often throws them off schedule and forces them to attack when the prey has not been sufficiently weakened.
I will not get into the third phase of domination because it is pretty obvious, as well as unpleasant. Most people who are in a position to build an immunity to psychopathic attack usually have gone through at least one or even more experiences of some kind of psychopathic domination or near-domination at some point in their lives. Certainly, the line between the second and third stage is blurred just as our sense of self becomes blurred as the psychopath feeds upon it.
Building immunity is akin to an organic process. There are no formulas or singular exercises. In our “cut to the chase” culture there is no chase to cut here. Like all organic processes it is gradual. Experience is always a great teacher, and as you have noted suffering through each cycle decreases each time. It is obviously more desirable, however, to attain immunity in a manner where we do not have to suffer for it.
I have noticed our friend Durand used phrases such as "happy to have danced with you". I noticed such expressions in other psychopaths as well. It seems to me the psychopaths attempt to capitalize on our need to gain through experience, by rigging the experiences of learning as just another strategy to keep themselves in proximity. Normal people feel drained by the conflict, while the psychos are envigorated by it.
I have seen too much to consider that conventional psychology or even biology suffices to really get a clear understanding of psychopaths on the individual level of encounter if not the social one. I am convinced that emotional immunity to psychopaths is what we might call a collective frontier. And it is a frontier that has never been properly addressed in the past.
It is, furthermore, a delicate subject to address because it is intimately personal as well as common to ensouled humanity. The acute distress of emotional upheavals generate a "stop the pain reflex", which may bias the mind into believing that emotional discomfort is something to be avoided or inhibited at all costs. You have expressed as much in your writings, I believe.
Most of us find ourselves in seemingly endless cycles of confronting one psychopath after another. At first all we have is the psychotic gauntlet to teach us. Slowly we can learn to stop the snowball effect before domination overtakes us. Then we can cycle through the painful tactics of the psychotic and recover faster so as to confidently halt the cycle before the psychotic begins probing for weaknesses. Finally, we can spot them through pure psychic sense, and with undeniable conviction at that.
I believe psychotics have a sixth sense as it were, and can sense their prey and the weaknesses of their prey like any evolved predator. Thus, in my opinion, the key to immunity lies in the development of the energy body and in particular the emotional body. A predator is attracted to the weak and dysfunctional, the dying but not the dead or soul-inert. A living empowered energy and emotional body is something the psychotic cannot digest. In fact, the very probability of encountering psychotics can eventually be eliminated with such empowerment, centring upon the attained integrity of the emotional body, the primary feeding ground of psychotics.
In principle, the world population would split in two parts, with whole people on one end and psychotics on the other. As this would occur integrated humanity can move to address pertinent issues in a more coherent manner. First, thing’s first and we need to take things one step at a time in my view.
In the next section I attempt to focus more on directly answering the $60,000 question. In doing so wanted to avoid any kind of presentations of methodology, simply presenting a kind of general direction that can be explored.