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Group Narcissism

I know that I haven’t posted for a while, and I assume nobody is really reading this, but I feel I should make this comment.

This past year or so has been a year of strong healing as I have discovered a LOT of things about myself. One of the very strong themes this year has been learning what happened to me—what people did to me. There’s a big list, but the one that fits the GFC history has to do with Collective Narcissism. This YouTube video explains things better than I can, but the point is essentially that a narcissistic system was working to destroy our “muchness” (to borrow a term from Johnny Depp’s Alice in Wonderland).

Thinking back, aside from the obvious markers such as the feeling that we alone on the entire planet had gotten Christianity right, one of my most vivid memories is that a largely invisible group of elders “sort of” ran everything and had opinions about all sorts of things in my life.

I say “sort of” because several other very shadowy entities had strong effects on my life. Hod Bolesky actually owned the houses where we lived, and we never talked with him, but he felt completely OK about walking into our house unannounced (and without knocking) to show it to a prospective buyer. Somehow we had to keep him happy. Steve Phillips had a strong opinion against modern music (probably something he got from Bill Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts training sessions—a very racist idea that strong bass in music was an African influence, therefore demonic), so our youth groups had to trim their sails to his wind. When I wanted to sell my van, Ray came to me with the announcement that “some people” thought I was asking too much for it. I never did learn who “some people” were, but they delivered opinions to me through Ray about a lot of things I did. They never had the guts to identify themselves.

It has taken years to finally turn my back on all that, especially on the internalized judgment that I was essentially a misfit who had something wrong with me. Doing much better now.

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