Imagine giving your child a whole bunch of substances, without knowing, how each affects them individually, how sensitive they are to that substance, how those substances might interact and who may be unable to articulate how they are/feel affected and who can't refuse.

This is a form of abuse and people would care much more about it, if "normal human" children would be affected, instead of disabled "defective objects".

5/5

@DemocracyMattersALot

#Distract #Intimidate #Silence #Abuse

A psychopathic president.

‘Longwell estimated that Trump might be trying to get people to look in a different direction after he backed down on his trade war.
"…like a guy with a laser pointer and the media is a bunch of cats. Is he trying to get people to chase things so they stop talking about the fact that he caved and did a total about-face on the tariffs after telling us for days that he wasn't going to do a pause? And now he's suddenly pausing because the world economy is collapsing. Is he doing this as a distraction?"
She then noted that targeting people like this can scare others away from leaking information to the public.
"And what he's trying to do here, though, is to make people afraid of speaking out against him.

‘Trump is trying to intimidate his staff from speaking out during this administration, she continued

…I mean, this is some of the most insane authoritarian stuff we've seen out of him."

A real "tell" of if someone is operating from an authoritarian mindset – vs just mentally ill, behaving from ignorance, or has out-of-control anger – is to watch how they treat those above them vs those below them in whatever hierarchies they inhabit.

If he hits his wife but not a police officer?

If she screams at her children but not her husband?

If he can control his drunken rage towards his boss but not people of color?

If they don't direct their misbehavior upwards the same way they do downline, then they CAN control their anger. They CAN control their mental illness. They DO know how to treat people they respect...

...the key here is that they don't respect those they see as beneath them.

And that's the real crux of their worldview, of their moral system. They have fully bought into Abuse Culture.

And make no mistake, when I searched inward, I found that, while I don't do this as blatantly as the abusers in my life, I did find some of these views inside myself, particularly in the way I treated children and in unpacking my implicit biases based on race, gender, and other vectors. Because abuse culture is programmed into all of us.

(HT to Lundy Bancroft of Why Does He Do That for making me aware of this dynamic.)

Essentially that's what my #AbuseCulture model does. It addresses those beliefs, not just within an individual survivor, but for all of us, in how we help abusers with our language, beliefs, preferences, in who we choose to defend, in our moral systems, in our laws and biases.

I've taken what I've learned from my own abuse recovery and therapy of many years, my studies on psychology and trauma, but most importantly, from learning about cults, high-demand groups, coercive persuasion, and religious trauma recovery, and merged those into a unified theory.

There really isn't much difference between domestic abuse and cult membership.

And cult recovery involves deconstructing those beliefs, making yourself aware of them so that you can consciously choose which to keep and which to throw away.

I've been out of Mormonism for 24 years, and I still find beliefs I have not been aware of this whole time. I've been away from my worst abuser for almost a decade, and still find beliefs he instilled in me that I have not yet examined.

The undue influence techniques used by cults are almost identical to those used by abusers and manipulators. These techniques are used at the societal and political levels as well, and can also demonstrate how racism, sexism, etc all work.

I can't tell you specifically which beliefs you have in you, but I can show you the purposes they serve... there will be beliefs about who you can and cannot trust, what you should be afraid of, what punishments await you for misbehaving, and a couple dozen others. Knowing that framework can guide you through discovering your own induced phobias, milieu control, and thought-terminating clichés.

(Brief plug for my book, Recovering Agency, which outlines 31 manipulation techniques in context of Mormonism, but that can be applied elsewhere.)

#ReligiousTrauma #Abuse
#PTSD #CPTSD #cults #MindControl

He escaped once. In 2005, when he was 12 or 13, he broke off a piece of the door’s center paneling; but rather than fleeing the house, he simply slipped down to the kitchen to scrounge for food. When his breakout was discovered, he told the police, his bedroom door was reinforced with plywood. Threats of withholding food, or violence, kept him from trying again.

#criminal #law #abuse

#GiftArticle link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/nyregion/ct-waterbury-captive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-E4.SKiQ.LBj5Qy1mwyhW&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“He didn’t get to see a movie. He didn’t get to go to a concert, he didn’t get to fall in love & get his heart broken,” Tessman added. “It kills me.”

Inside his room, which was secured with a slide lock from the outside, the man read & reread a handful of books, he told the police, looking up words he didn’t know in a dictionary. He “ultimately educated himself,” the police affidavit reads.

Pannone was not the only one trying to uncover that secret: For decades, the man’s half sister, Heather Tessman, whom their biological mother had given up for adoption before her son was born, fruitlessly dug through yearbooks of local schools she found online, …hunting for the brother she had met once, when she was 3 yrs old.

“You can’t find a person who doesn’t exist,” Tessman, 35, who lives in Vernon, CT, said in an interview.

Lopes can still picture a too-skinny kid with an infectious smile. The boy was standing on the peeling porch next door, but ventured no further.

“I said, ‘Where have you been?’” Lopes recalled. “I’m home-schooled,” was his answer.

In a warrant for Mrs. Sullivan’s arrest, the man said that his stepmother & his father forbade him to have friends. “I have been kept a secret my entire life,” he told the police.

Frustrated, Pannone tried another way.

He asked for the help of the Lopes family, who lived next door to the Sullivans & whose son, Peter, was then a 10-yr-old Barnard student. Pannone asked Peter & his family to keep an eye on their neighbor.

Peter Lopes, who is now 29, has not lived in the neighborhood since 2009, but said he remembered the last time he saw his classmate…shortly after the boy was pulled out of Barnard.