Hit Me With Your Best Shock

I struggle with something related to my lifelong battle with PTSD. Until a few years ago, when I was in counseling for what used to be called a "breakdown," (and very medicated so I could function) I brought it up. I always called it my "deer in the headlights" response. Now I know its an actual phenomena called the "freeze response."

Example: When I was about 13 my 'best friend' started dating a 32 year old guy. He would, at her request, pick me up when she and I were going to events at a local Evangelical youth group. He would either attend with us (as a counselor, no less!) or he'd come back when it was over. Bizarre I know, but I was 13 and naive. I came from a home where I had no privacy or right to my own opinions. And everyone always thought my 'best friend' was such a sweet, nice, perfect, wholesome girl.

The winters where I grew up were brutal. I was allowed to ride up front because I was so tall but often the three of us would be crushed in the front seat to stay warm. On more than one occasion this guy would stop the car somewhere and tell me to just relax and he & my 'friend' would jump in back and have sex. At the time I didn't know what to think. I got out of the car and stood in the freezing cold most times. It was as if I was nothing. I would freeze literally & figuratively. I didn't understand it until recently.

Why did I do that? Why did I put up with it? There have been times when people I care a lot about have sat and told me stories, to my face, of intimate encounters with others, or shocking and deeply personal things. Things that should have made me say "stop" but I didn't. I froze.

My parents would fight and my brother & I would hear every word and detail. Every time someone crossed my boundary without even stopping to ask if it was o.k., I said nothing - while the bottom would drop out of my stomach. I would just sit there. Sometimes the ringing in my head was so loud I didn't even hear them. I would plaster a smile on my face and be immobile. I beat myself up for years that I wasn't more outraged. Invariably I got told what a good listener I was. But frankly it was too much information.

Sometimes I wish
Often I wish
That I never, never, never knew
Some of those secrets of yours

NO SECRETS - Carly Simon

Conversely, I have had people decide not to be honest with me to "not hurt" me or "spare me" or just "cover up" their bad behavior. I never had enough ego or felt powerful enough to say no and just walk away or demand that I be treated better. At the time if I did, I was severely punished or lost someone who I cared about. If I did it as an adult, people I cared about would get angry and stop talking to me. They would rage at me. People I thought were friends were suddenly smearing me, insulting me and lying about me. No matter how much factual proof I gave them, they would adamantly blame me and 'shout me down'. I persisted in thinking it was some huge flaw in myself. But it wasn't at all. It was the negative narcissism & shock tactics of those around me.

It had another good effect for them. It deflected me from basic questions:
What makes you think its ok to do that to me/ say that to me?
Why are you doing this to me?
Why are you treating me like I am nothing?

They had no empathy or responsibility to me, in their minds, so why should they! Some 'friends' huh?

Here's an excerpt from a definition of someone with a Cluster B Personality Disorder (which are so prevalent today):

Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others' feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them. Their skills are used to exploit, abuse and exert power. Since the victim simply cannot believe the abuser would callously hurt them, they rationalize the behavior as necessary for their own "good" and deny the abuse. When these victims become aware of the exploitation it feels like an "emotional rape" to them.

Once again, the late Kathy Krajco blazes through the finish line with yet another astounding article on the shock tactics these types use:

THE INSTINCTUAL
"FREEZE RESPONSE"

When many of us are injured, we go into a state of disassociation at the moment of trauma to survive. Our body/mind experiences an instinctive "freeze response" and this positional, physiological memory becomes indelibly imprinted into our mind/body awareness. The sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous systems become stuck in a state of hyper arousal that is not under our voluntary control. It is like having your foot on the accelerator of a car and the other foot on the brake. This consumes an enormous amount of energy and eventually exhausts us.

Because this positional memory becomes disassociated and locked in our subconscious, we have no awareness of it and without conscious awareness, we have no control of it.

This "freeze response", over time, creates holding or bracing patterns that eventually produce increased chronic muscular tone, spasm, and myofascial restrictions that eventually become symptoms.

SHOCK TACTICS
by Kathy Krajco


Narcissists use shock tactics. They use them simply because they work. That is, they get a narcissist what s/he wants.

Narcissists shock you by reacting to something in a way that stuns you, like seeing an apple fall up from tree would. This is analogous to hitting someone on the head before you rob them. You are intellectually incapacitated, perplexed. While you're pinching yourself, you are disarmed, because you don't know what's going on. Your mouth is agape. You think there must be some misunderstanding, so you try to smooth it over.

The next thing you know, you've been run over. Shock tactics.

They prove that seeing isn't always believing, because afterwards you wonder if you imagined it. Maybe you missed something. The narcissist's behavior was so bizarre and crazy and hazy that you just can't quite believe it happened. Especially when he seems so normal today.

The typical reaction is to go into denial. To act like it didn't happen. That's what normal people do when they can't get their minds around something. In this case, it's a big mistake, because that is exactly what the narcissist wants.

Then it never happened, you see. His crazy behavior never happened. Really. He never abused you. Really.

Never, never, never forget for a moment that the narcissist ain't all there: he lives in the Looking Glass, the Land of Pretend, where acting makes it so. Truth has no relevance in that world. It doesn't even exist. The next day he acts like it didn't happen. That's his way of saying, "Let's Play Pretend It Didn't Happen." When you play along and act like it didn't happen, it didn't happen. His slate is clean, and he's not a crackpot.

So it's no wonder that narcissists like shock tactics when they discover how well they work at getting people into denial and acting like it didn't happen.

Especially when they hear idiots commenting, "Look, today he's acting like nothing happened. Well, okay, he has a terrible temper, but he's basically a good person, because see? he doesn't carry a grudge." The narcissist thinks, "Give that idiot an award!"

There are three elements to a narcissist's shock tactics:

· perversity
· extremism
· surprise

I mean perversity in the strictest sense of the word, as "thoroughly twisted." In other words, perverse behavior is not just odd, aberrant, or off course: it is backwards or upside-down, the antithesis of what would be appropriate.

A perverted reaction to something shocks us, because it's the opposite of what we expected. It also disarms us, because, in our interactions with others, we act with a view to the reaction we can expect in return. For example, you don't tell someone you love them to make them mad at you. If this is the first time you've told that person you love them, you might not know what to expect, but anger isn't one of the possibilities you have in mind. So, when he reacts with anger, you are stunned.

Usually we do know what to expect. And when we are wrong, there's normally some logical reason for it. For example, sometimes we get an unexpected reaction because we didn't see the action from the reactor's point of view.

Yet certain behaviors are so universal that we know what to expect even from a stranger with a different language and culture. Or even from an animal. For example, showing love evokes affection. Doing a favor evokes gratitude. Appeasement evokes peace.

But what happens when someone from the anti-universe reacts to these things with hatred, resentment, and aggression instead?

Ask Alice. She's been to Wonderland.

The narcissist's perverted reactions to things are also extreme. Extremely crass, vicious, and violent (either verbally or physically). He is a child who does not restrain his own behavior. The only reign on it is what he thinks he can get away with. So, behind closed doors with his family, alone with you or a lone employee, he goes over the top in wanton meanness. It makes him feel as unbounded as God.

And last, the element of surprise. You'd think he had a hair trigger. His temper flares in a fraction of a second and unexpectedly, for some anti-reason.

Irascible? I don't think so. Narcissists are no more irascible than you or I. Their shock tactics are a device, that's all. In medicine and Oriental culture, this type of reaction, an anti-reaction — a perverted, extreme, sudden reaction — is called an insult.

Here's an example of an insulting reaction: You throw water on a fire to put it out . . . only to have it flare up into a raging fire that vaporizes the water.

In other words, an insult is a blowback reaction, one that flies in the face of the stimulus. A narcissist's perverted reactions to things are insults, and they do INSULT you. For example, you try to appease him when he gets mad about something: instead of cooling off, he does the opposite — he flies into a rage over what you just said and attacks you all the more vehemently.

Narcissists cannot help but discover at an early age that normal people are taken aback by such absurd behavior. In fact, I doubt they need be aware of learning this. I say that because we sometimes subconsciously adjust our behavior to the kind they want in order to push their OFF button when they go into Obnoxious Mode on us. So, it seems to me that they can half-consciously learn some of their tricks.

However conscious they are of what they're doing, narcissists are amoral, so since shock tactics get them what they want, they use them. That's really all there is to it. Nothing deep, smart, or fascinating about it. Even a dog learns to growl and act ornery if it gets what it wants that way.

So, the moment you depart from a narcissist's script, he snarls. That is, the moment you act like his equal or as though you deserve anything. His sudden surliness at such moments is just his way of saying, "Don't go there," as if he were herding stray cattle back in the right direction.

Play along; say or do nothing that contradicts his lies and delusions. It's hard enough to believe them, and you are hurting him if you aren't helping him believe them.

Here is an example. Let's say your narcissist has gone off about something. You try to smooth it over by saying, "Oh, come on. Let's not fight. I didn't mean anything by that. Really. I'd never want to hurt you."

He gets madder yet. Huh? Yes, he gets madder yet.

Why? Because that still isn't what he wants you to do. You still aren't playing along with his script in Pretend. You didn't admit any wrongdoing. What you said to appease him doesn't appease him because it doesn't reflect on him as grand and on you as a guilty, despicable thing.

Never forget that he is a mental three-year-old who knows only one trick: throw a temper tantrum whenever people aren't doing what you want them to. And keep throwing it till they get it right.

One of the most memorable scenes in Dante's Inferno occurs at the gates of Nether Hell. It is far below God's dump for the vast masses of weathervane minds blowing whichever way the wind of political correctness blows today. It is even far below those guilty of sins of incontinence or raw emotion. So far below that a gigantic, iridescently multi-colored winged scorpion (fraud) had to fly him and Virgil down from a precipice to the bottom of that abyss.

For a place nobody wants to go, the City of Dis was well defended. Huge walls. The Harpies (Furies) were the gatekeepers. Dante and Virgil had been able to relate to, and reason with, the souls in Upper Hell, had never been attacked by them, and had always gotten appropriate, natural reactions from them. So their initiation to Nether Hell was a shock.

For some inexplicable reason, the Harpies flew into a rage at Virgil when he asked to come in. Virgil, the personification of Reason, was stunned and perplexed by this backwards and extreme reaction. It was a blast of antigravity that blew back in his face and got him headed the opposite direction.

Moreover, he then acted as though it hadn't happened.

As they say, Truth is stranger than fiction. This was truth. Like Shakespeare, Dante was a keen observer of human behavior and knew that this is exactly what people do when subjected to the shock treatment: They blink and act like it didn't happen.