Can You Empathize?
by Underground Panther in the Sky
When I was growing up and I faced people in school on the bus, people who rejected and bullied me, soon I felt strange, like I had been marked.
When kids from schools I had never attended, kids I never met spat on me, it felt like I had some invisible neon sign on my forehead -- I could not see it only bullies could see it. It felt bad like the mark of Cain. It was burned into my being by abusers. The contact I had with psychopathic evil that erased my self-hood as an innocent kid, in repeated blinding soul-shattering moments of senseless unspeakable horrors and betrayal, made a mark.
If you care and can feel, and see too much of the evil in the reality we live through, too soon, too close it changes you forever. I knew this was true even when I was 6 years old. I just didn't have the words to express it than like I do now. It felt as if abuse had made a change within me, a message I did not want to send out, advertising the damaged goods -- I am walking wounded.
I feared it signaled to the predatory sociopaths in this world to come and take me down like prey. I felt I couldn't erase, hide or fix the mark or make it go away. Seems my feelings were not just my depressed imagination.
I still suffer trauma effects years later, like many other abused kids and military vets who also never "get over it". It's like abusing a child turns them from gold to lead. Making a soldier shoot innocent people who caused him no direct harm gives the veteran PTSD.
Seems my feelings about abuse and its reality back then had a prophetic ring. The truth can seem weird or threatening to those out of touch or unfamiliar with certain realities some of us face. The mark was a reality for me. I felt it as if it was a physical scar, a bleeding wound that never stopped bleeding.
In the '80s my feelings would have been seen as a symptom instead of a fact, because abuse left no visible wounds.
Sociopaths do not get PTSD. They can't get it because they are incapable of feeling fear, or anxiety, or becoming attached to anyone. Sociopathy is not a "learned behavior," or environmentally caused behavior. The cerebral cortex in sociopaths' brains works differently than in non-sociopaths.
Sociopaths will deny real reality and assert their own "reality," until their victims have nervous breakdowns from all the lies, games, and mind-fucking.
It is impossible to coerce anyone to stop feeling anxiety or fear. You can bully them into hiding it or denying it, but you cannot coerce people into NOT feeling it. Sociopaths are born, not made. And when non-sociopaths are in contact with sociopaths, that situation creates victims with PTSD.
It has not yet reached the hearts and minds of the public that work trauma is a gross violation of human rights. Maybe the effects of everyday stress in today's culture may be so severe that they add up to chronic trauma, for everyone but the sociopaths. Invisible trauma effects, but always there. Does anxiety gnaw at you from different directions while you try to rest alone, in the dark? How often? Something to think about ...
Ironically, specific use of vengeance against a specific perpetrator of a crime by a victim does not make a victim into a bloodthirsty sociopath. But killing innocent people DOES create PTSD in non-sociopaths. And this fact goes contrary to popular beliefs about crime and victims that are just stupid, like the vampire myth that claims PTSD or child abuse "creates" sociopaths. Many popular myths blame the victims. It gets irritating dealing with these popular and asinine myths again and again.
And killing off the sociopaths dominating a group does not have to create more of the same order every time. People can learn to create boundaries -- if baboons can do it, we can too.
Do you trust Sandoz or Astra Zeneca to be ethical with a drug that could make torture, rape, pedophilia, and war into "victimless" crimes, by simply erasing the scars it leaves inside its victims, so victims are left clueless, and therefore less wise and easy prey? We might suffer less, but we also might care less. Is it worth it to live without emotions, attachments, love, and beauty?
In the end this all boils down to a war between two kinds of essence, perpetrators and survivors. It's not just humans that are facing this serious situation Animals face it too. Animals go to war. Animals can thank the people who rescue them from abusers.
Female ducks are evolving bodily defenses to stop gang rape. Male ducks don't have much empathy for female ducks if they almost drown them while raping them.
Animals DO kill themselves. Like people do. Maybe suicide is universal, because the brutality of existence itself has made life unbearable for some animals too? LINK LINK LINK
Animal modeling of PTSD symptoms. People inducing the effects in animals, and it looks like when people gets PTSD. 'Coin-ki-dink?
Or not? Scientific evidence strongly suggests that to maintain emotional and physical health we have to know how to relate to each other in a caring way. The undeniable evidence is that anger, anxiety and depression, on one hand, and love and intimacy on the other, affect health and recovery from illness. This findings have been elaborated by Dean Ornish MD in Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy (1997). He writes:
SOURCE
When I was growing up and I faced people in school on the bus, people who rejected and bullied me, soon I felt strange, like I had been marked.
When kids from schools I had never attended, kids I never met spat on me, it felt like I had some invisible neon sign on my forehead -- I could not see it only bullies could see it. It felt bad like the mark of Cain. It was burned into my being by abusers. The contact I had with psychopathic evil that erased my self-hood as an innocent kid, in repeated blinding soul-shattering moments of senseless unspeakable horrors and betrayal, made a mark.
If you care and can feel, and see too much of the evil in the reality we live through, too soon, too close it changes you forever. I knew this was true even when I was 6 years old. I just didn't have the words to express it than like I do now. It felt as if abuse had made a change within me, a message I did not want to send out, advertising the damaged goods -- I am walking wounded.
I feared it signaled to the predatory sociopaths in this world to come and take me down like prey. I felt I couldn't erase, hide or fix the mark or make it go away. Seems my feelings were not just my depressed imagination.
I still suffer trauma effects years later, like many other abused kids and military vets who also never "get over it". It's like abusing a child turns them from gold to lead. Making a soldier shoot innocent people who caused him no direct harm gives the veteran PTSD.
Seems my feelings about abuse and its reality back then had a prophetic ring. The truth can seem weird or threatening to those out of touch or unfamiliar with certain realities some of us face. The mark was a reality for me. I felt it as if it was a physical scar, a bleeding wound that never stopped bleeding.
In the '80s my feelings would have been seen as a symptom instead of a fact, because abuse left no visible wounds.
Back in my youth it was an invisible injury. It was so easy to blame the victims back than, to keep them quiet. To tell them it is their fault they can't endure it, and harden their hearts. And it's all in their heads. Or even worse, the "get over it".The underlying message of that says, your symptoms make me uncomfortable by revealing things I'd prefer to pretend never happen to good people in my just world fantasy.
Sociopaths do not get PTSD. They can't get it because they are incapable of feeling fear, or anxiety, or becoming attached to anyone. Sociopathy is not a "learned behavior," or environmentally caused behavior. The cerebral cortex in sociopaths' brains works differently than in non-sociopaths.
Sociopaths will deny real reality and assert their own "reality," until their victims have nervous breakdowns from all the lies, games, and mind-fucking.
It is impossible to coerce anyone to stop feeling anxiety or fear. You can bully them into hiding it or denying it, but you cannot coerce people into NOT feeling it. Sociopaths are born, not made. And when non-sociopaths are in contact with sociopaths, that situation creates victims with PTSD.
It has not yet reached the hearts and minds of the public that work trauma is a gross violation of human rights. Maybe the effects of everyday stress in today's culture may be so severe that they add up to chronic trauma, for everyone but the sociopaths. Invisible trauma effects, but always there. Does anxiety gnaw at you from different directions while you try to rest alone, in the dark? How often? Something to think about ...
Ironically, specific use of vengeance against a specific perpetrator of a crime by a victim does not make a victim into a bloodthirsty sociopath. But killing innocent people DOES create PTSD in non-sociopaths. And this fact goes contrary to popular beliefs about crime and victims that are just stupid, like the vampire myth that claims PTSD or child abuse "creates" sociopaths. Many popular myths blame the victims. It gets irritating dealing with these popular and asinine myths again and again.
Tim Field, author of Bully Online, gets it:
"The main lesson I have learnt is that when dealing with a sociopath, the normal rules of etiquette do not apply. You are dealing with someone who has no empathy, no conscience, no remorse, and no guilt. It is a completely different mindset. Words like 'predator' and 'evil' are often used. "
And killing off the sociopaths dominating a group does not have to create more of the same order every time. People can learn to create boundaries -- if baboons can do it, we can too.
Yet people are already calling us with the diagnosis of trauma as "dangerous", accusing survivors of malingering, saying trauma costs too much to treat. Ironic the things I already knew, deep inside, about abuse effects upon people and how it effects the world. They are being "discovered" now.There is a scary side to such physical validation of prior traumatization. Which is, what will this information be used to do to US -- psychiatricly, socially, politically. For there are many psychopaths and predatory people in charge of society now, they HATE the victims of abuse, because if the victim is validated they have more than their voices and memories, they have EVIDENCE. The perpetrator cannot hide from his own shit now, unless the perpetrators act in the guise of helping create drugs to erase "the mark", or erasing our memories and our consciences.
Do you trust Sandoz or Astra Zeneca to be ethical with a drug that could make torture, rape, pedophilia, and war into "victimless" crimes, by simply erasing the scars it leaves inside its victims, so victims are left clueless, and therefore less wise and easy prey? We might suffer less, but we also might care less. Is it worth it to live without emotions, attachments, love, and beauty?
In the end this all boils down to a war between two kinds of essence, perpetrators and survivors. It's not just humans that are facing this serious situation Animals face it too. Animals go to war. Animals can thank the people who rescue them from abusers.
Female ducks are evolving bodily defenses to stop gang rape. Male ducks don't have much empathy for female ducks if they almost drown them while raping them.
Animals DO kill themselves. Like people do. Maybe suicide is universal, because the brutality of existence itself has made life unbearable for some animals too? LINK LINK LINK
Animal modeling of PTSD symptoms. People inducing the effects in animals, and it looks like when people gets PTSD. 'Coin-ki-dink?
The species, the identities and upbringing of these sociopaths, does not matter really. The real point here is: Can you empathize, do you care? Will you stand up for others, will you act upon the desire to protect the living beings in this world from those who abuse them?
Or not? Scientific evidence strongly suggests that to maintain emotional and physical health we have to know how to relate to each other in a caring way. The undeniable evidence is that anger, anxiety and depression, on one hand, and love and intimacy on the other, affect health and recovery from illness. This findings have been elaborated by Dean Ornish MD in Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy (1997). He writes:
*…love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well... I am not aware of any factor in medicine -- not diet, not smoking, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery-that has greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes. ...Society is slowly coming out of the haze of denial about systemic abuse by this civilizations' hierarchical domination and exploitation system. More people are finally seeing sociopaths for what they are. I hope the survivors win this war, because I could not live in a world without love. And apparently, even the animals agree with me on this one.
"Yet, caring (love to be blunt) which is presumed to be based on a mammalian instinct, strongly allied with survival is fraught with difficulties and is becoming increasingly difficult to exercise in our culture."
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