Transcription
What happens when your family, which are supposed to be the sanctuary, the refuge, a protection from the world, from harsh reality, from abrasive events and threatening developments—what happens when your own family is the enemy, is the battle zone? What happens when your family threatens your mental health and sometimes your very survival? What happens when you feel alien and estranged and in the wrong place when you are with your family members, in your household, at home—supposedly where you should feel most comfortable, most accepted, most loved, most cared for, where people should empathize with you, listen to your problems, help you solve them, and in at any rate afford you succor? So what happens when you have nowhere to turn because the enemy is within?
My name is Sakin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. I am also a professor of Clinical Psychology, and today we are going to discuss family mobbing: when your family is the mob that is pursuing you within an inch of your life. I start by announcing a playlist; uh, later today there's going to be a new playlist on my YouTube channel, a playlist of family dynamics. You can find this video and many previous videos about family dynamics in the playlist.
Before we proceed with this, with the topic of this video, which I know would be of great interest to many of you—many of you come from a background of dysfunctional families; you found yourself within dysfunctional relationships because you recreated the initial, original dynamics within your family of origin—but before we go there, there are two types of family mobbing: insidious and overt. The insidious type is hidden; it's occult; it's obscure; it's subtle; it's difficult to convince outsiders that something bad is happening within the family unit. The overt type is visible; there is physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse. Perhaps the other end of the spectrum, there's parentifying, instrumentalizing, smothering, and spoiling, overprotectiveness; but in any case, these are visible, ostensible, not to say ostentatious, signs of family dysfunction.
The insidious kind is much more onerous, much more difficult, because it does not allow you to communicate to the outside; no one would believe you. All the signs are that something is wrong with you; you're being paranoid; you're being hostile; maybe it's just a rebellious phase in your own personal development as a teenager—who knows? The family looks perfect; there is love; there is harmony; there is caring and compassion and affectionateness; there is attentiveness; everyone is there for each other, except for you. So something is wrong with you. The family is perfect; the imperfection is all yours.
We know that narcissistic families—families who incorporate a narcissist—the narcissist could be parental figures, narcissistic mother, narcissistic father; the narcissist could be siblings, your sister, your brother—so narcissistic families present a facade, a facade of harmony. Narcissistic families are much more concerned with appearances rather than substance, and this facade of harmony is known in clinical terms as pseudomutuality: fake mutuality, fake love, fake concern, fake support, fake sorrow. The emphasis is on the word “fake,” as you have gathered by now. And there are families which are equally narcissistic or infested by narcissists which present a facade of disharmony; there's a lot of constant bickering, arguments, fights, debates, and even physical violence. This is known as pseudo-hostility.
In both cases, the pseudomutual family and the pseudo-hostile family, the members of the dysfunctional family are not allowed to separate and individuate; they're subjected to a power asymmetry, in cult-like settings. Some members of the family have all the power; some members of the family are totally dependent and disempowered, and the whole family functions as a cult: we against they. This, the external world, the outside world, is hostile; it's a jungle; these are enemies, and everything should remain within the family; all the processes are internalized; nothing is ever externalized, not even aggression. Aggression within the family is simply redirected at one of its members, also known as the scapegoat.
The family homeostasis, the balance, the precarious balance that keeps the family together, the glue that holds the members of the family within the same unit, is threatened by honesty. When one of the members is honest—one of the members of the family is honest—the king is naked. This threatens the balance of this kind of family. The family demands compliance; the family demands submission; the family demands conformity; the family demands, in other words, silence. And any dissent, any criticism, any disagreement, any suggestion undermines the family’s unspoken homeostasis and equilibrium. Such utterances, such an attitude of dissent, of disagreement, threatens the family’s very core and balance, and the family reacts as a unit against the dissenting individual, against the rebel, against the culprit, against the criminal that is threatening to destroy the family. It all revolves around honesty. Such families—and these are, of course, dysfunctional families—despise and detest and hate honesty. The greatest threat is honesty, because these families are constructed around a denial of their own problems. The problems should never be discussed; no one should acknowledge the very existence of any problem. The family is perfect. If there are any apparent problems, they are exactly that: apparent, and they will go away; they're temporary, and they probably—these problems probably have been imported from—from the outside. The outside world has caused this problem because a family in itself is an isolated unit, is perfect; it's the outside world that is destabilizing the family.
So the member of the family that challenges the consensus of the family, the member of the family that exposes the lies that underly the mythology of the family, the member of the family that criticizes, that disagrees, that points a finger—this member of the family is a traitor; this member of the family is collaborating with the outside world against the family; this member of the family burrows into the family’s foundations, undermines the family, and seeks to destroy the family. And so the whole family gangs up on this individual; it’s a form of gang stalking; it’s known as family mobbing. There is a collusion in bullying. This individual is bullied—usually it’s a single individual, the scapegoat. This individual is bullied, and the reason for bullying is to deflect attention from real problems. These families, of course, are dysfunctional; these families are dangerous; these families are pseudomutual; it’s a fake; it’s a facade. These families are, in other words, not families; whatever they are, they’re not families in any meaningful sense, and yet the pretension to be a family is the most important thing, and anyone who challenges it, anyone who undermines it, anyone who doubts it should be penalized. These kind of families are—are highly punitive because they escape, they avoid, they evade real problems, and they deflect attention from these problems onto the scapegoat.
Members of the family ally with the powerful against the powerless and helpless. So the—if there’s a member of the family—could be a father, could be a mother, could be a sibling—member of the family is naturally psychopathic, naturally bullies, naturally antagonistic, naturally intimidating, naturally un-narcissistic. This kind of person is going to create alliances and coalitions within the family because people gravitate towards power. Bullying is perceived as power; it’s a misperception, of course. Bullying is a strong indication of fear, panic, and weakness, but it is misperceived frequently as a kind of power, and so members of the family gravitate towards the powerful, the powerful sibling, the powerful parent, and they collude with this individual to bully others within the family.
The scapegoat role, the role of the scapegoat within the family, is integrally—integrally a part of the cult-like settings. These families operate exactly the way cults do: there is brainwashing; there is coercion; there are threats and intimidation; there is guilt-tripping; there is shame. Rebecca Mandeville calls it the Family Scapegoating Abuse, or FSA. Behaviors common in these families involve bullying, harassment, control, coercion, intimidation, including atmospheric—atmospheric and ambient intimidation—unspoken, not spelled out, and yet very present. Gaslighting: the reality, the perception of reality, the gauging of reality of the scapegoat is challenged; the scapegoat is made to believe that something is wrong with them; they’re misperceiving reality; they’re misreading it somehow. And there’s a lot of defamation and smears; for example, members of the nuclear family would defame and slander and lie about the scapegoat to members of the extended family: aunts, uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers.
Within such families, there are monopolies of truth; in other words, truth is undebatable; truth is decided by a select group or an individual within the hostile family, and only that individual has a monopoly of the truth. Whatever this individual says must be so; there’s no arguing; there’s no challenging; there’s no debating; there’s no discourse; there’s no communication. A single individual dictates what is true and what is not, what is right and just, and what is wrong and unjust. This individual is the bully, and the bully in such families maintains the monopoly on truth. When the bully in such a family presents a version of events, it is accepted immediately, and when the scapegoat challenges this version, the scapegoat is penalized; there is slander, and there is gossip; there are many control instruments; there is shaming; there is guilt-tripping. It’s all about manipulative mind control. Control is crucial in such families exactly because these families are fragmented; they’re fractured; they’re weak; they’re dysfunctional; they’re about to die. And so control is crucial because it maintains the facade and the appearance of a cohesive, functional family. There’s a need to control everything; there’s a need to control information; there’s a need to control emotions; there’s a need to control behaviors; there’s a need to control the hierarchy—who is on top, who is at the bottom; there’s a need to control the roles—each one has a role; the scapegoat has the role of the scapegoat; the golden child has the role of a golden child; the mother plays the mother—she’s not a mother; the father acts the father—it’s all a theater production; it’s all fake; there’s no family there; there is the pretension to a family; there is a movie of a family, but there’s no family, and no family dynamics. Family dynamics have been replaced with a power play in mind games.
One of the main instruments the family uses against the scapegoat is invisibility—rendering the scapegoat invisible, ignoring the scapegoat in a systematic way, neglecting the scapegoat as a policy, betraying the scapegoat, and then claiming that it’s not true; there has been no betrayal. This is known as betrayal blindness, rejecting the scapegoat, ostracism socially, emotionally, and otherwise, not providing the scapegoat with any share of the resources of the family. So the golden child gets everything; the scapegoat gets nothing. And so it is as if the scapegoat is not alive; it’s a denial of the very existence and visibility of the scapegoat; it’s a pretension that the scapegoat is no longer with the family.
The core issue in—in such families is what I call the repression ethos. The repression ethos is: you should never discuss some things; you should never discuss the family’s dynamics; you should never discuss the family’s power structure; you should never discuss justice in such a family; you should never discuss your emotions; emotions are delegitimized—I call it the delegitimized effect: no emotions, please; we are not a family. Everything is repressed; you cannot and you are not allowed to express your experience of trauma and abuse; you’re not allowed to verbalize the breach of trust that has affected you so profoundly; the negative emotions—you’re not allowed to suggest that you are subjected to a profound betrayal by someone you depend on or love in any crucial way. And this denial, this repression, leads to dissociation and to a host of long-term mental health disorders and attachment problems: an insecure attachment style, a fear of intimacy, a rejection of love, and the inability to maintain properly functioning relationships. The scapegoat recreates the original hostile family of origin in all future relationships, one way or another: approach-avoidance, maybe, uh, rejection of the partner, suspecting the partner in a paranoid way. There are many, many manifestations of the damage done to members of families which are essentially hateful families, founded on negative emotions such as anger, envy. So we have negative-affect families and positive-affect families; their family is founded on love, and their family is founded on hate and envy and rejection and anger. And if you came out of a family that had nothing to offer you but negative effects, negative emotions, that had nothing—there’s no way to relate to you but except by rejecting you and casting you as the bad guy—then the damage, regrettably, is full-blown.