When the victim becomes the villain : some reflections

This post is inspired by a valued fellow blogger : Alex of Evolution of Self. Unlike me I don’t think the Superego tempers Alex’s self expression as much as it does mine. I put that down to my education and having a mother who both raged but would silence or deflect voices of dissent and having a father who never stood up enough to tell her to ‘back the ‘F’ off!!” then did things that erased me in a way I could not fully understand without a lot of therapy.

In a way my own ‘villainy’ became turned against myself in my addiction and through becoming clumsy, ‘absent minded’ and accident prone.. It is interesting to me that it was just as my sexuality was about to awaken and express I nearly died in that crash. I remember having a lot of anxiety around it and my body prior to the accident.

I have a ‘raw’ video to post on what happened to my mouth and teeth I may post later today, that shows, in that accident the car came into me cutting my body and lancing my tongue as teeth were torn out, I fractured a rib which punctured a lung that then bled fluid into the lung so that when I woke in the smash before the paramedics came I was almost drowning in my own phlegm.. Exploring it all through therapy and cranio sacral sessions the awakened trauma repeated in 2005 and I crashed again and sustained a head injury that still impacts my living and digestion…. I am currently in the anniversary trauma zone of that period June to August which corresponds with my husband leaving and that accident a year later in 2004 – 2005.

I thought today and explored in therapy yesterday some of Alex’s recent comments on how wounded Superheros always retain the ‘flaw’ of their woundedness which makes them avengers, the depotentiation of their own assertive needs or earlier abandoment trauma or suffering then becomes the fuel they use to fight so called villains… Some of Alex comments raise issues such as the issue of whether an ‘eye for an eye’ actually is an effective way of dealing with wounding.. Is vengeance justified to make the abuser pay? And is it a helpful way of reconciling trauma? For myself I have always sought more internalised ‘solutions’ but the acting out of my past has also evoked rejection from others lacking necessary empathy or emotional insight.

The Christian philosophy of ‘turning the other cheek’ may turn us into people who are abused again if we don’t deal with the legacy of wounding and develop a radar and other self protective strategies..In emotional recovery work we deal with the wounding of childhood by facing it, we cannot just ‘put our trauma aside’ as some suggest until we have felt the full force of it because it still impacts us if it is not made conscious..That is why the parent who turns themselves against the child and teaches him or her to act against their own assertive, self protective reactions and distrust their gut instincts and response, often also turns them into the ‘identified patient’. That parent, in many ways, is even more ‘evil’ or anti life (evil = live spelled backwards) than the one who may only enact physical abuse.

We all know that emotional neglect as well as consistent invalidation abuse as well as negation and demonising of primal impulses can leave deeper and far more hidden scars that out right abuse. Add to that the social pressure exerted on the sufferer to swallow it down, pretend, deny and present an image of to ‘doing good’ i.e. be polite, well mannered, well controlled and pleasing or to at least have all of one’s aggressive impulses drowned, submerged or held in check and you have a profound situation of ‘soul murder’ which is also emotional and spiritual.

I have been seen as an annoyance to others for daring to express and carry trauma.. I deal with some of this in the v log I will post after this. After the sinus operation in 2013 which I didnt really need and was all down to emotional and grief issues I flew into a bit of a rage with Jasper when he peed all over the bedroom armchair.. I didnt hurt him but I shook him really hard and screamed at him then called a close friend very distressed who called another friend to come walk him but i broke down and she and her husband looked at me like I was vermin then she told me off and lectured me about my ‘anger issues”… Later she did apologise but our friendship has never been healed although later she did apologise.. Its interesting that she turned up at my mother’s funeral in 2017.

I have looked like a villain when I screamed at my brother for being so emotionally out to lunch. It probably was the least effective way of dealing with someone with those kind of narcissistic issues who is invested in seeing me as the ‘problem’ but my expression was authentic… In the past I have fought for the nephew who cast me out of his life last year after the ‘Scott” issue became public knowledge after putting me down for the fact I had never ‘made it in the world by my own efforts’ in the way he had.. He had never had my level of trauma.

I will no longer as willing to play the role of the ‘scapegoat’ which could be another word for the person who gets seen as the villain being sent out into the wilderness all alone where they must, in time find themselves. … My family is riddled with alcoholism and buried emotions, on latest outings with my sister I see the about of booze being put away and the numbing that goes with it, luckily recently I made a new friend with 20 years sobriety I was able share about this with.. I see the levels of narcissism and vanity at times and they make me ill.

Thank God I AM NOT NUMB ANY MORE but I carried the emotional abandonment wounds of both parents and Mum’s multi-generational legacy and it is interesting that retrograde Mercury passed over the degrees of both my mother and father’s Pluto in Cancer over the past weeks of its retrograde movement… Pluto in Cancer has to do with the mother/nurture wound of generations and in particular the generation born in the 1920s. I addressed the Neptune in Leo wound of the same generation in a recent post… Leo in many ways is the Solar father/energy that needs as its loving counterpart the lunar/mother energy.

\The recent FULL MOON LUNAR ECLIPSE in Cancer (moon/mother) and Capricorn (saturn/father) awakened this polarity….Capricorn and Leo are both fathering energies.. Sun is more to do with spirit soul essence while Capricorn/Saturn refers to discipline, laws of nature, fathering and husbanding of energies, the skeletal form which provides the structure to hold tendons and tissues and flesh and muscles while Mars as ruler of Aries where it is now transiting has to do with the will to move…

When will is disabled it may appear to become villainous or is labelled as so by the perpetrators invested in cutting the ‘victim’ down and keeping them buried under the weight of that judgement. However the true self will always seek a means of expression. I have not yet watched the movie The Joker my therapist has seen it and we discussed it in therapy yesterday.. Kat said it may be too hard core for me but that in essence it portrays what happens to a sensitive person who becomes perverted by abuse and trauma. I really must watch the movie though possibly due to my own issues I find violence hard to watch.

I often got in trouble with my ex who was abused for having compassion for abusers or at least questioning what evil done to them caused them to ‘turn’… Looking at and hearing what people such as Ghislaine Maxwell do to innocence people whose only ‘flaw’ (and my apologies here as I cannot find a better word to use here, for it truly isn’t a flaw to be trusting, innocent and naive) is naivety…can bring even me up short on compassion, surely one should have the heart to know what is loving and what is not to the tenderness of the feminine…

It is a sickenly harsh ‘reality’ to have to accept and look into the heart of what feels and appears to be pure ‘evil’, almost impossible to fathom the depths of coldness that must have turned the perpetrators hearts to ice.. Sadly softness and tenderness can be damaged in some people.. their empathy and capacity for true feeling destroyed. don’t have any answers here.. the world abounds with both villains and the vanquished as well as those who are unjustly villainised. It strikes me as deeply tragic and sad when it is the victim who is blamed and comes to be see as the villain due to lack of insight into and empathy for what befell them at the hands of an unfeeling being cut off so long ago from any shred of attunement for and protection towards what is most tender and vulnerable.

Possibly the victims of Epstein and Maxwell underwent their own dark night through enduring the toxic outfall of those painful encounters with the dark and an excessively evil and almost ‘inhuman’ side of narcissism …Being treated only as an object strikes to the heart of malignant narcissism.. begging the question if the victim is ever really ‘real’ to the perpetrator.