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For all the severe trauma, neglect, abuse and malevolent treatment I endured during the first 18 years of my life, I have yet to thoroughly explore the topic of the book I am highlighting here today as it applies to my own life. I have known for many years that I had no relationship with my mother or father that was outside the range of what is described as a ‘trauma bond’ or as a ‘betrayal bond’. I had no safe and secure attachment relationship with ANYONE during those 18 years. I have evidently taken that fact so fore granted that it is only now as I continue to explore the CONTEXT of the Bigger Picture in which the trauma that happened to me within that I am NOW directly faced with either paying some attention to what these kinds of bonds actually are – or not.
From a rather detached point of view I find it intriguing to learn this about myself: I did not move to the point where I could directly consider these damaged-damaging kinds of bonds UNTIL I reached a point where my interest and concern became focused not on my own story, but rather on the suffering of OTHER infants and children CURRENTLY trying to grow up in our nation as they suffer from all kinds of deprivations and traumas within malevolent environments.
As I noted in some of my recent posts, it is within the CONTEXT and within the Bigger Picture that I share the overwhelming suffering of my abusive-traumatic infant-childhood with LOTS of other people. These ‘other people’ are NOT only grownups. They are ALSO infants, toddlers, childrens and teens who are suffering NOW – in real-time. As I have pursued my own understandings about what happened to me from the PAST on into the present real-time moment, all boundaries and distinctions I might have had about ‘my suffering’ and the suffering of others have vanished.
In this dissolution of distinctions about suffering I am left taking a closer look at the conditions within our American nation that are not only allowing growing numbers of our offspring to suffer, but that are contributing to this suffering. I realized a long time ago that especially in regard to infant abuse our culture has built into itself such a taboo against harming little ones that we don’t even want to THINK about let alone TALK about the fact that infant abuse does happen!
Now I feel like I am broaching yet another taboo subject – what is wrong with America. As I take a look at this subject I feel I am wandering around alone in a very dark bramble thicket – but I will not change my direction. Forward I go, no matter how uncomfortable this stage of my journey is.
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I will be continuing to post further excerpts from the book I introduced in last evening’s post, America’s Sacred Calling: Building a New Spiritual Reality (2010) by John Fitzgerald Medina. At the same time I admit to myself I am reaching WAY OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE as I tackle the information Medina presents. My realization is that I am unable to make any further progress toward understanding suffering in the context of the nation I am a part of if I don’t at the same time understand that I have a BETRAYAL BOND with America.
As members of a social species we are programmed in our DNA to seek protection by being with others of our kind. We are most comfortable being a part of the larger group at the same time that our innate physiological attachment ‘wiring’ makes certain that if we move too far out of our ‘group comfort zone’ – we will FEEL IT as discomforting, threatening and downright scary! We will feel this threat in terms of lack of safety and security at the same time our attachment systems go into full play.
I suspect that most people instinctively align themselves with their own nation in the same way that infants and children align themselves with the caregivers they are dependent on for protection-need fulfillment. Dependency based on NEED can be a powerful force that keeps us even as adults from asking questions and surveying factual information that MIGHT BURST OUR BUBBLE about anyone we are reliant on for protection-need fulfillment – including facts about our own nation.
In this context of examining context I present the following information on ‘betrayal bonds’. This information comes from this book:
The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships (1997) by Patrick J. Carnes
Product Description
Patrick Carnes presents an in-depth study of exploitive relationships: why they form, who is most susceptible, and how they become so powerful. He explains to readers how to recognize when traumatic bonding has occurred and provides a checklist so they can examine their own relationships. Included are steps readers can take to safely extricate themselves or their loved ones from these situations.
In Carnes’ introduction to his book he states:
“Betrayal. A breach of trust. Fear. What you thought was true – counted on to be true – was not. It was just smoke and mirrors, outright deceit and lies. Sometimes it was hard to tell because there was just enough truth to make everything seem right. Even a little truth with just the right spin can cover the outrageous. Worse, there are the sincerity and care that obscure what you have lost. You can see the outlines of it now. It was exploitation. You were used. Everything in you wants to believe you weren’t. Please make it not so, you pray. Yet enough has emerged. Facts. Undeniable. You sizzle with anger.
Betrayal. You can’t explain it away anymore. A pattern exists. You know that now. You can no longer return to the way it was (which was never really as it seemed). That would be unbearable. But to move forward means certain pain. No escape. No in-between. Choices have to be made today, not tomorrow. The usual ways you numb yourself will not work. The reality is too great, too relentless.
Betrayal. A form of abandonment. Often the abandonment is difficult to see because the betrayer can be still close, even intimate, or may be intruding in your life. Yet your interests, your well-being is continually sacrificed.
Abandonment is at the core of addictions. Abandonment causes deep shame. Abandonment by betrayal is worse than mindless neglect. Betrayal is purposeful and self-serving. If severe enough, it is traumatic. What moves betrayal into the real of trauma is fear and terror. [my note: I would add here that trauma is ALSO about overwhelming helplessness, hopelessness and great pain and suffering!] If the wound is deep enough, and the terror big enough [and great pain and suffering], your bodily systems shift to an alarm state. You never feel safe. You’re always on full-alert, just waiting for the hurt to begin again. In that state of readiness, you’re unaware that part of you has died. You are grieving. Like everyone who has loss, you have shock and disbelief, fear, loneliness and sadness. Yet you are unaware of these feelings because your guard is up. In your readiness, you abandon yourself. Yes, another abandonment.
But that is not the worst. The worst is a mind-numbing, highly addictive attachment to the people who have hurt you. [my note: Addictive physiological patterns use the same chemicals and body-brain routes that human attachment does. When our earliest caregiver attachments hurt us, our body-brain had no choice in the beginning of our life to alter the way our attachment patterns built us and built themselves into us in our early unsafe and insecure human environment.] You may even try to explain and help them understand what they are doing – convert them into non-abusers. You may even blame yourself, your defects, your failed efforts. You strive to do better as your life slips away in the swirl of the intensity. These attachments cause you to distrust your own judgment, distort your own realities and place yourself at even greater risk. The great irony? You are bracing yourself against further hurt. The result? A guarantee of more pain. These attachments have a name. They are called betrayal bonds.
Exploitive relationships create betrayal bonds. These occur when a victim bonds with someone who is destructive to him or her. Thus the hostage becomes the champion of the hostage taker, the incest victim covers for the parent and the exploited employee fails to expose the wrongdoing of the boss. {my note: I am also becoming very clear that, against all our nation’s social taboos about ‘thinking this way’, that our nation itself is allowing an abusive exploitive relationship to continue to grow between ‘the rich and the poor’. I have a betrayal bond-attachment (as I suspect most of us do) to my own nation!] Sexual exploitation by professionals – such as in the Father Porter case, the Pied Piper phenomenon at Jonestown, and the kidnapping of the children from the school bus at Chowchilla – grab national attention. Yet the bonds formed in those situations have much in common with the experiences most of us have.
We typically think of bonding as something good. We use phrases like male bonding and marital bonds, referring to something positive. [my note: and ‘the mother-infant bond’ – the following bold type is mine] Yet bonds are neutral. They can be good or bad. Consider destructive marriages as in War of the Roses in which the attachment results in a mutually destructive bond that cannot be broken. Partners cannot leave each other the bond is so strong, even when they clearly know the risks. Similarly, adult survivors of abusive and dysfunctional families struggle with bonds that are rooted in their own betrayal experiences. Loyalty to that which does not work, or worse, to a person who is toxic, exploitive or destructive to you, is a form of insanity.
A number of signs indicate the presence of a betrayal bond:
1. When everyone around you has strong negative reactions, yet you continue covering up, defending or explaining a relationship.
2. When there is a constant pattern of nonperformance and yet you continue to believe false promises.
3. When there are repetitive, destructive fights that nobody wins.
4. When others are horrified by something that has happened to you and you are not.
5. When you obsess over showing someone that he or she is wrong about you, your relationship or the person’s treatment of you.
6. When you feel stuck because you know what the other person is doing is destructive but believe you cannot do anything about it.
7. When you feel loyal to someone even though you harbor secrets that are damaging to others.
8. When you move closer to someone you know is destructive to you with the desire of converting them to a non-abuser.
9. When someone’s talents, charisma or contributions cause you to overlook destructive, exploitive or degrading acts. [my note: Alas, I am also ‘reading’ patterns here that describe the nation I am a part of]
10. When you cannot detach from someone even though you do not trust, like or care for the person.
11. When you find yourself missing a relationship, even to the point of nostalgia and longing, that was so awful it almost destroyed you.
12. When extraordinary demands are placed upon you to measure up as a way to cover up that you’ve been exploited.
13. When you keep secret someone’s destructive behavior toward you [my note: and I would add in the case of our nation ‘against others’] because of all the good they have done or the importance of their position or career.
14. When the history of your relationship is about contracts or promises that have been broken and that you are asked to overlook.
Divorce, employee relations, litigation of any type, incest, child abuse, family and marital systems, domestic violence, hostage negotiation, kidnapping, professional exploitation and religious abuse all are areas that reference and describe the pattern of betrayal bonding. They have in common situations of incredible intensity, or importance, or both. [my note: I place our ‘national allegiance’ in this same category when the wealth and interests of the few causes great harm to the desperate many] They all can result in a bond with a person who is dangerous and exploitive. Signs of betrayal bonding include misplaced loyalty, inability to detach and self-destructive denial. [bold type is mine]
If you are reading this book, a clear betrayal has probably happened in your life. Chances are that you have also bonded with the person or persons who have let you down. Now here is the important part: you will never mend the would without dealing with the betrayal bond. Like gravity, you may defy it for a while, but ultimately it will pull you back. You cannot walk away from it. Time will not heal it. Burying yourself in compulsive and addictive behaviors will bring no relief, just more pain….
You can click on this title and go to Amazon.com to explore the Table of Contents and other pages, as well. I haven’t read the book yet as I just discovered it in my searching today. I will either locate a copy through my local library or buy one for myself. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships (1997) by Patrick J. Carnes
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Stop the Storm 
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