Category Archives: Awareness

Awareness, Devaluation, red flags, Seduction

My Secret Garden

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my-secret-garden

Would you like to know what my garden is like? Before I tell you, why don’t you stop and close your eyes and picture in your mind’s eye what you think my garden looks like? That’s right, conjure up the image that forms when you think of me and what my garden might be like. Take your time, move around it and ensure you have given it due consideration as you generate the image. Have you done it? Did it take you long? I suspect you managed to envisage it rather quickly didn’t you, after all, you are well-known for your amazing imagination aren’t you? I often find I have to apologise for your fantastic tales and over the top comments, but that is to be expected of somebody like you. Anyway, let’s leave your behaviour to one side for the time being (although I will return to it when nobody is looking, you can be assured of that) and let’s consider what you created in your mind.

I should imagine that the landscape you have formulated is one of two outcomes. I expect that some of you will have pictured nothing but concrete. All plant life and flora banished by a solid slab of grey cement that has solidified into an impenetrable barrier that stretches in all directions, lifeless and uninspiring. Once there might have been a flourishing and verdant garden but it has been banished by this concrete covering which has extinguished anything that grew or blossomed. If the concrete carbuncle is not what you saw in your mind then you will have opted for the alternative. You will have pictured solid, barren and lifeless soil which will not sustain anything of beauty. A toxic and poisonous stream flows through the centre of it, dead fish floating on their backs as they drift lifelessly along. Not even algae grow on this polluted stream. The few trees there are in this garden are dead. The bark grey and lifeless, forlorn limbs stretching into a dark grey sky, where there is always cloud. The branches and twigs are leafless. The bushes consist of brambles which hinder anybody who might try and move through this uninviting place. There is no grass and there a few brown, dried-out husks which suggest they might have once been something greener and vibrant. There are no sweet smelling flowers here, only the awful stench which rises from the slow-moving stream which looks more like treacle that water. Even the weeds are few and far between, struggling to find any sustenance from the sterile soil.

Is this what you saw?

Come and follow me as I take you into my secret garden. I produce a key from my jacket explaining that very few people ever get to see my secret garden but I am letting you inside because you are special and I like you. I open the thick gate and usher you inside. You do not see me hurriedly lock it behind you since you are busy staring at the beautiful garden that rolls out before you. Capability Brown must have laboured long and hard here. The lawn is flat and even, the grass has been rolled so that stripes have formed and there is not one blemish to be seen amidst the green, green blades. The edges of the lawn have been carefully cut so that no grass overhangs so that there is a distinct line between the lawn and the flower beds. The soil looks fertile, well-nourished and is free of weeds. A dazzling array of flowers grow from this well-tilled soil. Strong stalks reach up towards the azure sky, shiny leaves sprouting from the stalks before the injection of colour appears. Every shade of the rainbow is represented amongst the many varieties of flower that flourish in my secret garden. Brilliant blues, fiery oranges, ruby reds and sunshine yellows abound. The flowers have short petals, long petals which move in the gentle breeze, there are bell-shaped flowers, trumpet shaped flowers and others shaped like stars. White, purple, scarlet and ochre all combine to create this tapestry of beauty. A stream gurgles as it passes through the garden, cutting across the magnificently manicured lawn, so that an intricate bridge has been created allowing one to traverse from one side to the other. Bushes ring the flowers, an expert in topiary having crafted them into sensational shapes. Beyond the bushes are the trees, tall and trimmed so that they form a fence around this paradise. You stand on the edge of this magnificent garden utterly transfixed. The scents waft from the roses, from the lilies and the sweet William combining to create a heady concoction of fragrances. You are over awed by this display.

“Do you like it?” I ask.

You are dumb-founded, unable to speak. All you can muster is a slow nod as you feel a tear trickle down your cheek from your left eye as you are overtaken by how beautiful it all is.

I beckon to you and you follow me to a nearby apple tree which is festooned with fruit. The red and green apples hang from the branches and I pluck one and pass it to you. You smile and take a bite anticipating how fresh and crisp the apple will be. Your teeth easily sink in as you are surprised to find the flesh of the apple soft. You taste bitterness in your mouth and instinctively spit out the piece of fruit.

“What’s wrong?” I ask as I select an apple too.

“It is sour,” you explain. I take a bite from my apple and you hear the crunch as I take a chunk from it. I chew and through the mouthful explain that mine tastes fine. I hand the apple to you and you bite into it. It is soft and again tastes sour. Confusion rises inside you as you look at the apple and see a maggot wriggling beneath where you have bitten into the apple. You hurl the apple away as I invite you to sniff a magnificent rose nearby. You lean in and inhale its perfume, pulling the petalled head towards you. There is no scent and instead you sneeze. As you let go of the rose you give a short cry of pain and find that a thorn is wedged in your finger, the blood already spooring from the wound and trickling down your finger. You sneeze again,your nose irritated by something and you keep sneezing as your eyes water. You stagger away from the rose still sneezing and into a bush but it is not the sculpted creation you saw moments earlier. Instead, you feel a prickling sensation as you are stung and realise you have stumbled into a bed of nettles. Pain rising you stagger away, eyes streaming and make for where you recall the stream is hoping to use the cool, clear water to wash away the irritation you have suffered. You can just make out where it is through your blurred vision as you drop to your knees only to cry out again. You have knelt on some thistles.Where did they come from? This lawn was flawless before. You reach out flailing for the stream but there is nothing, The water has gone and the stream has dried up. You feel something wrap around your left wrist and as you try to wipe away the tears from your eyes with your free hand, you feel pain as a vine begins to tighten about your wrist. You pull trying to free yourself from it and twist around to call to me for help.

The smooth lawn is no longer there. Gone is the rolled grass. Instead you are looking at a mountainside, rugged and steep. You yank your arm as the vine is trying to pull you and look upwards. You can see me standing there smiling at you, looking down from my lofty position atop this mountain which has sprung out of nowhere. A cold wind begins to blow as you shout for help, another vine beginning to snake towards you. I tilt my head as if I cannot hear you, a smile still plastered across my face.

“Help me, what is happening?” you shout.

“Nothing,” I call back, ” I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“This. The garden, it has changed,” you yell above the gathering wind. You see that I am shaking my head.

” Not it’s not, everything is just the same, Beautiful isn’t it?” I reply.

You frown. How can I not see what has altered? The beautiful glade has become a hostile and hurtful place. How has this happened to you? You try and crawl forward and I stand watching you, offering no help as more vines snake towards you, the ground beneath you hard and stony. The vines wrap about you and threaten to pull you into the abyss below you. All the while I stand and watch smiling.

Welcome to my secret garden.

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Awareness, empath, emptiness, fuel, impact, secondary source

The Crying Game – Part Two

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 THE CRYING GAMEPART TWO

Having ascertained that the commission of tears arising from physical and/or emotional hurt resulted in a sympathetic reaction from certain people, I committed this to memory. I have rarely encountered much physical pain as an adult, enjoying excellent health and ensuring that I always get my retaliation in first so my enemies are the ones who experience physical pain rather than me. The early conditioning that I have been subjected to, as I now understand, appears to have resulted in me being impervious to many emotional injuries that others suffer from. Even the horrendous sensations which arise from my wounding as a consequence of criticism does not cause the tears to fall. Instead, I must focus on repairing the wound through retreat or the instigation of fury in order to gather fuel. The attention this requires means that I do not suffer the immediate reaction of becoming upset. I must feign upset in order to attract the required sympathy and in doing so I use that issued sympathy in order to bring about the control I require over the subject.

My tuition in the art and use of crying later embraced a different catalyst and one which has served to drive me ever onwards and upwards. I have many gifts and of those the one that was cherished most by my father was my academic ability. As I have mentioned beforehand, he was a very intelligent man, well-read and with an interest in the world at large, something which be bestowed on all his offspring. This served him well in both his careers of commerce and then academia. His was the steady hand at the tiller of our academic progress and he sought to steer a path through the choppy waters of my mother’s ambitions for us, our own desires and what he felt would serve us best. The three, as might you expect, were not always compatible.

I excelled at school which naturally resulted in my progression to sixth form college and I was always destined for university. Naturally it was to the most prestigious that I was directed towards and I achieved admission whereupon in such a fertile environment I began to flex my tendrils as I embraced my dark art, but that is a tale for another time. Alongside this I flourished at my chosen discipline and eventually I graduated with a double first. It was this achievement which Dr E honed in on in one of our discussions.

“So a double first, quite the achievement,” he remarked. I nodded. He was not wrong.

“What did your parents think about it?” he asked.

“My friends once they had their results went racing away to telephone their parents to let them know the outcome. I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“It had already been arranged that I was meeting my parents for dinner that evening and I would tell them my degree result once we ordered.”

“What did you think of that arrangement? Weren’t you keen to tell your parents sooner of your success?”

“I suppose so but I knew there was little point. Even if I had tried to telephone them, nobody would have answered. My mother would have deliberately absented the house so I could not reach them so as to avoid spoiling the anticipation at dinner.”

“So this arrangement was at your mother’s behest?”

“Of course. Who else? If I achieved the expected outcome the evening would pass pleasantly, if I did not, I would be subjected to a lengthy cross-examination unable to avoid it by putting the telephone down.”

“I see. It was fortuitous then that you achieved such an excellent result.”

“Fortune had nothing to do with it. This dinner was placed in the diary as soon as my mother knew when the examination results would be posted. It was a further incentive for me to achieve what was expected of me.”

Dr E nodded and made a note.

“How did the meal progress then? How did they react to news of your achievement?”

“Once our orders had been placed and the waiter walked away, my mother turned to me and asked ‘Well?’ I responded with, ‘I obtained a double first’ and she answered by saying, ‘As expected. I will make the call,’ and she left the table to telephone the other family members to let them know, probably her brother first of all out of them all.”

“No mention of well done or congratulations?” asked Dr E.

I shook my head.

“And your father?” he asked.

“My father waited until my mother was out of earshot and he reached across and placed his hand on my arm and said, “Well done HG, very well done, that is a fantastic outcome. I know just how hard you have had to work for that result. It is a magnificent result, truly outstanding. I am so very proud of you son, very proud indeed,” and then as he said the word proud his voice cracked and I looked up into his eyes and I could see that he was crying. I had never seen my father cry before. Ever. I had seen him concerned, downcast, worried and so much more, but never the tears. His face was fixed with a huge smile and he tried to speak again but he was overcome with pride. Pride for me. Just me. I had not seen anything like it.”

“How did you feel about him showing such pride for you?”

“I was taken aback but then I felt this surge through me and it felt amazing. It was visceral and ever so powerful as I continued to look at him, the tears filling his eyes and he kept nodding. His hand patted my arm, I can still picture it now. He wasn’t able to speak but the look on his face and that nodding told me that somehow he felt that the job was done, the mission had been accomplished and he was proud of me for doing so. I have never forgotten that moment.”

“Why?” asked Dr E.

“Because the way I felt when I saw my father cry tears of pride at my achievement made me want to see that again. The sense of power that he imbued in me, his praise, his pride, his adoration of my achievement was so edifying that he made me strive even harder. Oh, my mother thinks she is the driving force behind my success and it would be wrong to say she has not been. She has been a huge influence but from that point onwards, my postgraduate achievement, my securing employment and advancement through the hierarchy to where I am now and also in terms of what the future may bring has been driven by my father. I wanted to feel that power again and for that to happen I wanted to see those tears of pride again. So I worked damn hard. I never knew that pride would make someone cry. I never knew that someone’s proud tears would make me feel so powerful.”

“I see. Did you see those tears of pride again from your father?”

I felt the first flicker of the ignition of my fury at this question.

“No. Once again something special to me was taken from me.”

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Awareness, Discard, escape, Hoovering

The Post Discard Battle – Pt 1

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the-post-discard-battle-pt-one

Everything we do is regarding as a battle. It is a zero sum game. What you lose, we gain. There may appear to be a “win/win” scenario during seduction but it is not the case. Believe me, we are getting what we want, positive fuel in huge quantities and the repeated binding as we draw you closer and closer to us. You are made to feel like a queen but you will be deposed and beheaded or defenestrated in due course. You always pay for the golden period we shower you with. We draw up our battle plans when we ready ourselves to seduce you. The greater of us adopt the approach of every battle is won before it is fought. The lesser of our kind remain effective but they rely on being a blunt weapon, not possessing the intellectual finesse of us greaters. The lesser plans less and relies on the visceral (unknown) need for fuel to drive his battle strategy. His is all about reaction and immediate response, an automatic adjustment, which is invariably successful because he has been blessed with those tools, blunt as they may be.

          Our engagement with you is not love. It is war. We conquer, overrun and blitzkrieg you into submission. We occupy you so that your heart and mind fall to us within moments. This army of occupation does not stop there as it raids the land it now resides in. Your resources become our resources and we ensure that our supply lines are fed from your assets. The occupation eventually takes a savage turn through devaluation as we slash and burn, looking to grind you into the dirt before leaving you a stripped, bomb-blasted shell and setting off for a new campaign against some unsuspecting target. The theme of battle and your entanglement with our kind being a battleground, is one which is repeated throughout your engagement with us.

          This is especially so once the callous discard has taken place. It is then that you find yourself confronted with three battles which take place one after the other. Not only do you have us as our foe but in an especially unappealing turn of events you find that in fact you are actually fighting against yourself. The first battle following discard is the emotional one. You have been left with no explanation. If one was tendered it made no sense. You cannot reconcile where you are with what has been. The descent from gilded pillar into the dust has been swift and merciless. Every day you have run the gauntlet of scores of emotions, which has drained you, eroded you and taken a significant toll on your well-being. Your emotions are red raw, heightened and easy to trigger. Your pain is extensive, agonising and brutal and it is during this emotional battle that your ally of cool, detached thinking has not fled the battlefield, it never turned up to begin with. Your ability to assess, rationalise and consider your position with the necessary critical analysis evades you. All you are left with is a cauldron of emotion, which serves only to heighten your distress and your confusion. Nothing makes sense and you have not been left in a position to make any sense of what has happened. This is entirely deliberate. I know so many of you use the phrase “hot mess”. This is entirely apt. You are a mess. Your life is a mess. The heat comes from your raging emotions as you veer between hysteria and anger.

          Of the three battles that you fight post discard, the emotional battle, the first, is the one which you invariably end up losing. This is because you are utterly ill-equipped. If you were an army your troops would be sharing guns, you would not know which way to face, your supply lines have been overstretched and in some places broken and the enemy seems to appear at will. The fog of war obscures your vision. Is that us advancing or just the silhouette of a tree? You cannot tell. Once you could, but no longer. It is a tortuous place and one which has been created through our design in order to ensure that when return (and we will) you will be in no position to resist. Weakened, governed by emotion rather than intellect you will be overrun easily. This is when the hoover operates. This battle, where all you have is emotion, means that you want the pain to stop. You want the golden period again. You give no consideration or thought to what might be the price of such desires, or whether it really is the golden period once more. You are ruled by emotion and this proves to be your downfall. We know this and this is why we ensure you are a churning, broiling scorching crucible of emotion. We create it, we want that. This is why your first attempt at no contact (without the benefit of specialist input) nearly always falls. You are not equipped to prolong it because in this emotional battle all it takes is for us to come galloping over the hill once again, offering terms of the golden period and you surrender in an instant allowing us to occupy your territory once more in the understandable but ultimately forlorn hope of a peaceful co-existence.

          How do you win this emotional battle? You cannot. You are in such a position that we always win this battle. The key however is not to participate in this battle but rather avoid it altogether. If you know there is a battle you cannot win, why would you ever fight it? You would not. You would evade your foe, take steps to bolster your defences and seek to avoid this emotional battle. This is what you must do. Once you have gained awareness of the foe you are engaged with, possibly during seduction or more likely through the period of devaluation, you must then take those steps to prepare yourself. You either avoid the emotional battle altogether by escaping rather than being discarded. Alternatively, you steel yourself for the inevitable discard so that the emotional fallout is massively reduced and instead you find yourself transported to the second battle that takes places post discard which I shall expand on in a further article.

          If you have been discarded, then you face the emotional battle and you will lose. You must avoid the emotional battle in its entirety or engage on terms in the second battle which follows post discard.

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Awareness, smearing, triangulation

Smeared – 5 Reasons Why Smear Campaigns Are So Effective

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It is highly likely that you have been on the receiving end of a smear campaign. It is unusual if such a campaign is not used by our kind when dealing with the person who holds the position of primary source of fuel. The benefits of instigating the smear campaign are numerous and indeed in many instances the smear campaign is a necessary device for the maintenance of appearances, fuel and control. Since we are creatures of economy when it comes to the expenditure of our energies we operate those manipulations which are the most rewarding in terms of energy versus effectiveness. Smear campaigns rank high on such a list and this is for the following five reasons.

 

  1. Conviction

The smear campaign is rolled out in a convincing fashion. It is done with speed, it is done for the most part without your knowledge and it is effected by us in a manner which suggests that our words are undeniable truth. We are very good at persuading and portraying something as correct and the truth when it is not. We will seize on some element of your behaviour, some aspect of actions on your part or things you have said which are recognised by people. Perhaps you once got drunk at a party and kept falling over (it was a one-off and not helped by the fact you hadn’t eaten beforehand the copious amounts of alcohol we plied you with) but this forms the basis of creating a picture of your abusive alcoholic actions. You may be known for getting over emotional, especially when tired and therefore the picture is painted of you as histrionic. Taking some germ of truth and then applying it out of context, exaggerating and magnifying is a skill we utilise in the creation of the smear campaign.

“Yes, I am afraid I am at my wit’s end with Jenny, her drinking is out of control. I have kept a lid on it so far for your sake, I didn’t know want you upset, but I do not know what to do. You remember that party at Jonathan’s? Yes, that’s right when she could not even sit up, that’s a nightly occurrence now.”

We speak with such conviction and confidence that people do not challenge what we say. People usually accept the truth of what they are told by other people. This is a necessary social device because if it was to the contrary nothing would get done if people were suspicious and question everybody’s motives and comments. We play on this default setting and our confident and superior nature allows us to create a convincing smear campaign and thus guarantee its effectiveness.

 

  1. The Façade

Our façade of respectability that we have carefully created whereby we are seen as good, reliable, dependable and kind to the outside world provides us with serious support when doling out a smear campaign. In the similar way by which we point to evidence of your drink problem, temper tantrums and neediness as the basis for a much larger and wider problem, we rely on the existence of the constructed façade to demonstrate that we are not the issue. How can we be? We are seen by your friends, the neighbours and your family as that generous, pleasant and helpful chap who must be a good husband and father. He always says hello, is polite, holds down a good job, is seen out and about in the community and so forth. The creation of the façade is not only important for us to draw fuel; it is a fundamental part of why our smear campaigns are so effective.

 

 

  1. You Don’t Help Yourself

You fall right into our trap with a lot of your behaviour when you discover that you are being smeared. Rather than consider obtaining some independent and impartial evidence which you present in a calm and measured manner, allowing people to reach their own conclusions, you charge around, wild-eyed and upset, declaring repeatedly that

“It is him, not me, can you not see it? You must be blind or stupid if you cannot.”

This will not endear you to anybody. Nobody likes to be criticised. By slating their ability to make a decision you make them defensive and it becomes easier for them to make a decision which favours us. Do they believe the calm individual who has presented as such for the last year or so and who has come to explain you have a problem and we need help to deal with it or do they believed the swivel-eyed, tear-stained, histrionic person who keeps protesting it is not them? It is not a difficult decision to make.

Of course we encourage you to present in such a manner through our steady manipulative treatment of you. Moreover, we know that it mightily offends you to be thought of as something that you are not and in your frazzled and highly-strung state, you will not approach the denial of the smearing in a rationale or constructive fashion. This heightens the effectiveness of what we are doing. To some extent, you are proving our case for us.

 

  1. You Are Eroded

Linked to the above is the fact that when the smear campaign starts you will in all likelihood have been subjected to a sustained period of devaluation which has taken its toll on you. You will be exhausted from our tactics of preventing you from sleeping. You are anxious. You are hypervigilant. You cannot think straight owing to fatigue and the gas lighting to which you have been subjected. Your confidence has been whittled away and your ability to think in a critical fashion has been damaged. The combination of all these ailments means that you are ill-equipped to fight the battle with us for the minds and hearts of those observing. We got in first and you will always be fighting an uphill battle with few resources to rely on. You will have been isolated by us from your support networks. At best this means you cannot call on help when you most need it. At worst this results in those people you thought you could rely on, taking our side. This ineffectiveness of your ability to cope – caused by us – results in our campaign becoming more effective.

 

  1. Aversion to Conflict

People do not like conflict. People hate it when a couple divorces. It is not so much about feeling sad for the fact that two people they like are splitting up. Instead, it is more about the selfishness which means they have to choose one over the other and they would rather not do so. They want people to get along and when we present to those observing that we have tried to make things work but you have not allowed this to happen, the observers’ inherent desire for people to get along causes them to prejudge you. You become labelled as the troublemaker. People have their own lives to lead and they want everything else to run smoothly around them. If you are preventing this state of affairs from existing, then this will result in those supposedly impartial observers taking our side and not wanting anything to do with you because you have breached the peace. Knowing this to be the case of course will cause you to react even more and it becomes self-fulfilling. Again, this backdrop of the mind-set of others has this impact on the effectiveness of our campaigns.

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Awareness

Self Awareness

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One of the common themes in my sessions with Dr E and Dr O is their need (note not mine) to have me be aware of what I am. Of course I know what I am but as ever I went along with their questioning. Initially this was all about how I regarded myself. I enjoyed this part and I could have gone on for some time. They reported back to me that I consider myself as more intelligent than most people, that I am more amusing, I am more likeable and more successful. I am also more physically attractive than most people. Well, hell yeah ! They then also established that I am obsessed with power (who isn’t if they have any drive and ambition – you don’t become President by sitting there do you?). I am also impulsive. I agree. I am arrogant (I call it confidence but what’s in a word?) and I like to exaggerate my success and abilities. That is true, how else am I going to get people to do what I want.

Things got interesting after that. The sneaky duo had been asking questions of others about how they perceived me. I was fascinated as they told me that their perceptions of me were bang on what I thought about myself. How about that for getting it right?  I was rather pleased. Dr O asked,

“Some of those traits could be viewed in a negative light. That is how other people see you. Does that not concern you that they view in a negative manner.”

I shook my head.

“You label it as negative. I regard those traits as strengths and it is clear that other people do as thy have clearly identified them with me.”

She raised her eyebrows (recently plucked I noticed) and remarked,

“What if I told you that those people do regard those traits as negative?”

“If they do then that is jealousy for you. Or I suppose they are too stupid to recognise the brilliance of what I do.”

“Okay, but what if I was to tell you that those people are intelligent and they answered honestly and consistently?” she pressed.

 I shrugged.
“Would you not rather they liked you for decent qualities such as honesty and trustworthiness.”
“I’m not bothered about whether they like me or not, I want them to admire me for what I am.”
I know precisely what I am. Anybody who tries to tell you that I am oblivious to it is a moron. The only difference is that some people regard what I am as a bad thing. I know they are wrong. What I am is a good thing. The world needs people like me.

.

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