How many times are the members of this board going to make the same mistake over and over before they learn?
Some of you guys have been here for a really long time.
You guys are incredible!
You know, I've watched it happen so many times it's almost comical. Over and over again. You guys have such high expectations of everyone else but yourselves.
You talk the talk but don't walk the walk. See now, someones gonna come on over hear and complain I'm scaring away the newcomers!
Hypocrites. Sure, you'll lynch somenoe familiar but the moment someone complains about it, you'll talk about the "newcomers" or the good of the board.
What nonsense.
And don't even comment that I should reveal myself!
Wouldn't I be a fool. So you can do that same thing to me that you ALWAYS DO??????
You push people away. You ostracize them. You gather in groups in the face of their pain. You create bad people and good people. You turn a deaf ear to someone who is hurting. You become righteous and indignant. You're so loud and full of histronics, you can't hear anything anyone else is saying. You cower in the corner. You run away. You come out fighting. You take sides.
You do this every single time there is a conflict, big or small. So predictable.
When will you learn. When?
People leave here, this board, in tears, in pain, with a heavy heart and scars and you just want to be left in peace to talk about your "situations" and your problems but never do a damn thing about it.
You can't even be caring, supportive, loving, honest, upfront, humble, giving, to someone online - it's no wonder. It is no wonder.
And don't you even get me started on you so-called Christians! Cut throat and arrogant, that's what you are!
How many times will it go down before some one here will open their eyes?
"Innocent" Bystanders What about all the innocent bystanders? What can you expect from them? In a word, nothing.
The most deplorable thing about narcissistic - (or any) - abuse is the bystanders' reaction to it. It can end your naïveté and turn you into a cynic overnight. The universal complaint of those targeted by narcissists i(abuse) s that they are universally abandoned. But let this fact comfort you. It's not because of something wrong with you, it's because of something wrong with them.
Something that, perhaps for lack of a better name, has been dubbed Normal Personality Disorder
First let's understand this phenomenon. I warn you that doing so is painful. But from this understanding you can gain some guidance on where to look for help and where to place your trust — in outsiders, not insiders.
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander— Israeli historian Yahuda Bauer
as quoted on the wall of United States Holocaust Memorial, Washington, D.C.
People are like sheep. When a wolf approaches, you think they are blissfully unaware of his presence, but they are studying his every move. By showing no alarm, each sheep is just being careful to draw no attention to itself. The moment the wolf sets the evil eye on one of their number, the rest explode in all directions away from that lamb. In other words, they leave the victim to the wolf.
Which is to say that they abandon the lamb to the wolf. They betray (hand over) the lamb to the wolf. They sacrifice the lamb to the wolf. Don't tell me fifty sheep couldn't stand off a wolf, because they could. They just don't. Later, they come back to graze upon that very spot as if Lamb never existed.
History is replete with examples the human race doing the same thing. The most ironic famous example is what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. The same people who thronged to welcome him crying, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" one day abominated him crying "Crucify him!" the next. All because the wind shifted. So, they couldn't get close enough to him one day, and they couldn't distance themselves from him enough the next.
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering" — Judith Herman, Harvard psychiatrist, as quoted by Kenneth Pope in "Torture," a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Women and Gender
The same thing happens in every purge, pogrom, persecution, and witch hunt. People behave like unsupervised children do when a school-yard bully sets the evil eye on one of them. In fact, bullies quickly learn to exploit this behavior. The Lord of the Flies is a brilliant, sad, and enlightening novel (also made into a movie) that explores this phenomenon.
Before you know it, the bully is constantly picking on somebody. Why? To periodically make an example of what happens to anyone he sets the evil eye on. In other words, your little school-yard bully is now a terrorist. He is victimizing one kid to control the others. And he does so just frequently enough to maintain the atmosphere of terror he thrives on.
He deliberately targets the last ones to deserve his hatred, because that shows the others that they needn't give him any reason to attack. He is so wild that he is likely to just go off at anyone. This makes the other children fall all over themselves to ingratiate themselves to him. They are so anxious to kiss up that they take advantage of opportunities to be seen by him abusing his victim themselves. So, he can sic them like a pack of hounds on anyone he wants.
How do the other children justify taking no action against the terrifying bully and persecuting the victim instead? The same way the terrifying bully does — by blaming the victim. How do they deal with their guilt? The same way the terrifying bully does — by projection. Onto the victim, of course. So, the victim gets to be, not only the victim of their sins, but also the one punished for them to boot.
To "rationalize" (= irrationalize) what they're doing, the bystanders twist their thinking to pervert everything, so that anything the victim does is somehow wrong and everything the terrifying bully does is somehow excusable. They do this by looking on what the wild one does like those three famous apes...
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil
This is the worst form of lying, and to do it one must pervert the very mind to think something utterly absurd. Frankly, I don't understand how people can have so little self respect that they can bear to make such fools of themselves. But they do.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.—Voltaire
We see an example of this today in people making excuses (and blaming the victim) even for the sickening actions of Islamist terrorists whose behavior is the blatantly psychotic crime against humanity of indiscriminate mass murder of people for being the wrong kind.
And the kicker is the flagrant double standard: if the victim lifts a finger to defend himself, those "innocent" bystanders suddenly come to and scream bloody murder.
Is this Comedy Central, or what? They condemn the victim as evil for "attacking" the poor Islamists (waging war on him). This farce is extreme perversity, what Biblical theologians identify as the Sin of Sodom = "forcing someone to bend over for it." Christian theology marks it as the "outrage that cries out to the top of Heaven for vengeance."
Notice what these "innocent" bystanders are doing. They're awarding the bully the status of a child = one not responsible for his own behavior, one who may lay the blame for everything he does on someone else. In other words, the terrifying bully can do no wrong. Thus they absolve him of responsibility for whatever he does. No matter what, it is always the victim's fault for making him mad. Every bully and rapist and wife-beater says the same thing. Boys will be boys. What he did to her is her fault. She must dress so as to control his sexual appetite for him (by looking like a sack of potatoes). In the same way, we make Islamo-fascists mad by not letting Osama bin Laden dictate our foreign policy = making him mad by not letting him be our slave master. We mustn't set these wild people off by making them mad. Every time they throw a terror tantrum, it's our fault.
No matter what the context, it's always the same old story: Blame the Victim. That way, the wild one gets to do whatever he wants and have somebody else be to blame for it. Now that's infallibility. So, your "innocent" bystanders aren't innocent at all. Sad fact, but true. They're collaborators.
Are they all crazy? No, they are just actors. They are playing 'Pretend.'
They are pretending that they don't know any better. They are pretending that black is white and that up is down. They are pretending that they really are the nice people they're portraying and that the story is true. So long as the house lights are down and the outside world (the audience) is out of sight and out of mind, they are in their own upside-down little world. A Wonderland where anti-logic is logic, where foul is fair, and vice versa. Where their absurd charade is 'their' reality.
They are just being politically correct in their pretend world, which is a virtual reality that their virtual conspiracy enacts.
If the outside world intrudes on their play though, they'll check back into their senses instantly. Why? Because they know outsiders have nothing to gain by pretending they're too stupid to know better. So the actors know outsiders won't buy it. That's why the moment outsiders show up, the actors immediately drop character and behave as though they've been caught naked. 
