Descendants of Pain

In my post called generational amnesia, I wrote about the powerful emotional boundaries that define the outer reaches of safety and possibility for many descendants after a family or community experiences trauma, in many cases limiting their experience.

Many populations share the experience of their community being under active threat by another more powerful group. Blacks in the Southern states, Irish or Polish immigrants coming to the United States, Jewish people under threat of the Nazis. The experience is almost universal affecting every ethic group at some time in their history, since we have evolved through tribal leadership into monarchy alliances into modern day governments.

Just as individuals recreate personal traumatic circumstances over and over again, until and unless they ultimately outgrow it into healthier patterns, families and societies do the same thing, and we are still processing historical and communal atrocities together now.

When there are actual threats to the safety of individuals and families, they naturally align themselves into strong authoritarian hierarchies. Common attributes are strong top-down leadership, suppression of emotion, focus on obedience, suppression of self-expression, focus on contributions to the group and allocation of resources as group resources, among other things. Narcissism is what we call these same behaviors when the threat is no longer active and present, and the patterns themselves become the threat of harm to the individuals in the family.

Re-contextualized as such, narcissism as a group pattern becomes a rational response to circumstances, that just no longer exist. If you are living through religious persecution, the most stark example being the Holocaust, all members lives depend on the leader. That person can never experience their actual emotions because they have to be 'on' and anyone displaying actual emotion threatens a chain reaction that could sideline the whole group.

If someone is excessively emotional, they are a threat because any show of emotion could alert a guard, disrupt an event or take valuable time and ultimately endanger the entire group.

If someone breaks out of their proscribed role and is too much of a truth-teller, that too could cause group members to break down emotionally or it could cause too much attention or take too much time, threatening the entire group.

If someone was too talented, or attracted too much attention in a positive way, that too presents threat, as others in the community might be resentful, they could be tempted to steal, or guards to rape, making the family a target by other community members, or by the powerful outsiders.

If someone had too much independence, or wanderlust, or they were too confrontational, that person would be allowed to just go.

The imperative for everyone in the whole group would be to constantly stay safe, focus on the good and what good fortune they did have, and enjoy all the time possible with your loved ones so 'they' --the outsiders--did not win.

Leaders would have been called on to ration so much----who received health care, how to distribute limited food, who to invest limited resources in and mostly, who to trust. All members of the family needed to go through the leader for every decision, otherwise, the entire family could literally die. So, the reality everyone was facing justified whatever kind of emotional pressure it took to ensure complete and total compliance. The leader felt free to use every tool--overt and covert to keep everyone safe and alive, and the family members were just grateful to give over all sorts of things--autonomy, self-determination, recognition, the right to question decisions, privacy, and so much more, all as a way to express their gratitude for the work the leader was doing to preserve everyone's life, and gratitude all of those issues were not rested on their shoulders personally.

Members were taught and also instinctively responded by not ever questioning the leader. They also instinctively and reflexively gave all of their resources to be managed by the leader, who could ensure they could be used to barter for the life or safety of someone, could be given to another family in need, or could be protected from theft. Trust of the leader by the members was implacable.

Leaders had to absorb knowing about all of the danger, while keeping everyone in the dark and as happy as possible, while knowing some of their decisions about healthcare and food rationing meant some members would survive and thrive and others would not, and they had to reconcile themselves with the fact that sometimes that meant some family members would not survive because of their decisions. All while staying in 'role' nearly 100% of the time. No time to grieve. No time for sadness, anger or fear about their circumstances. This required superhuman strength.

Smart leaders begin grooming another family member to take over should the leader die or become incapacitated. All extra resources must be diverted to them so that the hierarchy remains and the subservient ones become dependent on them.

Also, leaders can not afford to feel their actual feelings, so they delegate others to feel for them. Leaders are also responsible to create an emotional tone for the entire group, and when everyone's safety is at stake, there is a big difference between what the leader wants the group to feel and what the leader and members actually feel. The leader gets good at using projective language, or projecting events or experiences onto others, emotions that would normally be felt by individuals in the moment are sublimated and sourced out to the entire group.

Leaders must control the emotional tone and keep the members safe from acting out on their aggressive instincts, both from conflicts arising within the group and from their natural feelings of anger and aggression toward the outsiders threatening their safety. They accomplish this by having the flexibility to tread lightly on those who can't handle much criticism even though they might deserve it, and creating whipping boy types from those with a stronger constitution even if they are not culpable for a particular act. This unpredictable and disproportionate distribution of rewards and consequences keeps everyone in a state of deprivation and under the leader's emotional control.

For this supersized and highly emotional role which is disproportionately larger than all other group members roles and contribution, and as a tranquilizer of sorts, because if the leader were to try to begin to emotionally process all of the trauma they are experiencing, it would open the floodgates and emotionally level them and incapacitate them, which is not a benefit to them or their members, they reward themselves with the largess of their group.

AND THIS IS WHERE THEY CAN DO SOME PROPERTY DAMAGE
Usually, because they can not feel, and to feel is to have limits and moderation and conscience, and self-control, they feel very entitled, and so they overdo it. The way this happens is unique to the trauma they have personally lived through, how much pent-up anger and revenge they feel but can not direct to the actual perpetrator, how inhibited they are from expressing that revenge, and how many resources they have access to. That is the formula for how egregious the entitlement expression is in real life. The corollary is the same formula for their followers, and that his how NOT angry they are and how NOT motivated they are to hold their leader accountable.

Everyone, at all levels of the hierarchy knows, the reckoning of accountability must never come. The leader must never be held personally accountable for the decisions that he or she made when the family was facing the threat. The accumulated trauma of so many losses, and the questions of conscience when there were so many grey areas and yet a decision had to be made, the emotional load from all of that accumulated atrocity is too great. That a person would have been called to perform the role of leader in those circumstances was too much. All of the fault lies with the persecutors, the outsiders. The leader has no guilt. The leader, like the followers, the entire community was ultimately all victims of the outside aggressors, without which these ghastly acts of survival would not have taken place.

Coming to terms with all of the losses and facing the multiple atrocities and layers of trauma of an experience like the Pogroms could re-injure everyone in the community, allowing the perpetrators to win yet again. Which must never ever happen. And, so, with the strength and resilience of the human spirit to survive and flourish, even in the most harrowing of circumstances, this kind of cancer encapsulates into itself, never to be spoken about in most families. Never to be thought about by most people. Never to be re-experienced and re-integrated. But, it does live on.

Just as living with a super-sized responsibility in a family and a community, while living under a tremendous amount of stress and constant threats with access to huge amounts of group resources creates a situation where a leader feels personally entitled to group resources and doesn't have self-control, groups who live under these circumstances have the propensity to cause even greater harm to their members or unwitting bystanders.

AND HERE IS WHERE THEY CAN DO SOME REAL HUMAN DAMAGE

When your family or your community has been victimized in some way---starved by your king intentionally because he wants everyone to become Catholic, starved by your king intentionally because he can sell potatoes for more money than if he just gives them to his citizens, forced to live in squalor without access to healthcare, food, education, shelter, or worse, shipped off in trains to your death, you have the lived experience of being treated like you might as well not exist. There is no value to your life, or anyone in your family or your whole community. There is no dignity. There is constant degredation. Everyday is worse than the last and you don't know how low it will go.

The anger and rage you develop toward your captors, which you can not express, lest you endanger everyone's lives further fills you with a resignation and fury that gives you the energy to live the rest of your days. But you learn never to ever trust an outsider.

The trouble becomes that sometimes that rage has nowhere to go, and everyone is a dead man walking anyway, a lot sooner than anyone all would normally be, and because no one is allowed to feel or else they release that torrent of emotion that levels members in instant incapacitation--the third rail---so no one is allowed to develop self-control, moderation, no one take in feedback about how their actions affect others, which are all necessary to develop a conscience, sometimes, in that rage and frustration, or maybe because something has triggered a reaction and a member doesn't have good self-control, they take all of that pent-up fury and rage they feel toward the outside aggressors, which is righteous and normal--and they instead direct it toward someone in their own group who has done nothing to them. Maybe someone younger, smaller, weaker? And because of how accountability and consequences are disproportionately allocated by the leader, maybe they feel there will be no consequences. Maybe they threaten their victim with saying not to tell or they will turn the entire group against them. Maybe they're confident the leader will cover for them. Remember their state of mind and life circumstances are quite different, they can not afford to value a life like we do in our society in this day an age, so what is the big deal. The true horror comes to the victim when their entire community turns on them, en masse, simultaneously, at either the direction of their attacker or the leader, sending them out alone, injured, into a hostile environment, with no resources, heaping blame for their new status as social leper, when the person has done nothing to deserve this vicious community betrayal.

In this way, all members practice a depersonalization and preparation for their communal demise. They act out the betrayal each person feels by playing it out in real life. The entire community has a fatalism, and an active or passive interest in self-harm and this scapegoating and community expulsion of a member serves to push someone into acting on those urges, perhaps when other members feel constrained. Again, people in these situations do not get to develop their own conscience, and they don't have the same value for the life of an individual or for their own life, as someone who has not faced such deprivation. Someone in this situation might think or feel the rational thing would be relief from suffering, or freedom, and in that situation, the only real option to achieve that is death. So, we need to be very careful about applying our armchair 2018 opinions about life and good and bad and nice and mean and really think about what it might be like to live day after day in the kinds of hardship and deprivation that I am talking about here.

The problem is that because of the nature of these types of atrocities: war, famine, religious persecution, sometimes the trauma was so great that our ancestors encapsulated the damage to survive and live another day, but they kept the same authoritarian group structure and parenting patterns as though your family is still facing a very dangerous active threat. And, consistent with those patterns, no one questions what the family has always done, even if it's causing harm. That is called Narcissism.

I will write many posts about the hallmarks of Narcissism and which threat they are intending to address, and how they are intending to address them. I don't think I can change your family's pattern, but, maybe it might help to have some emotional distance and compassion for them, so you don't have to spend a million hours wondering "What the motherfuckng hell?" like I have done in my life.