feeding frenzy in humans

Contents

Love of Tears

Even if you’re not being beaten up, you need to know about this other relationship disorder:

A reader of my website writes:

One time after an argument, my bf said to me “Oh Babe. I’m so turned on right now. I get rock-hard when I see you cry.”
I gradually figured out that this was the reason why he always tried to make me as sad as possible, as often as possible.

   — name withheld

Consider also these two quotes from old Internet forums:

I never thought my XN/P [narcissistic ex] was sadistic, but now I remember days where I cried my eyes out, and while the tears were streaming down my cheeks, he would become sexually aroused and start looking at my chest and touching me, then try to have sex with me.

   — quotes about abusers (archived from survivorquotes.bravehost.com)

She wouldn’t stop crying, so I had to have sex with her.

   — quotes from abusers (archived from survivorquotes.bravehost.com)

The moral: Some sick bastards get their jollies from seeing you cry.

Love of Bruises

You’ve heard that there are men who beat women. And you’ve heard the standard explanation: “Abuse is about control.” Well, what if I were to tell you there’s an additional reason, a reason that is five times as horrifying?

About 20 years ago I was scrolling through search engine statistics to find out what people are actually searching for.
I was choosing keywords for this website, using the Wordtracker.com web service. Wordtracker has a giant database of actual web queries — so they know what people are searching for.
Now, my website is a relationship education website, dedicated to helping people identify the abusers in their lives.
So I logged on to Wordtracker and typed several topics with “abuse” in the name.
After chewing on my request for a few seconds of CPU time, Wordtracker replied to me with some bad news:
(Are you sitting down? You should be.)

There are some men who search the Internet for photos of battered women because such photos turn them on sexually.
Just pause there. Let that sink in for a moment — better still, let me say it another way:
Some men are such sick psychopathic f*cks that photos of beaten women (with blood, bruises, and tears) are their pornography. That is the imagery they find erotic. Those are the kinds of pictures they search for on the Internet.
These human trash really aren’t much different from sharks: They seek out people who are bleeding, and feast (figuratively) upon them. The term “feeding frenzy” fits.

I no longer believe we live in a simulation. I now believe we live in The Bad Universe, the universe where Mr. Spock has a beard.

Psychologists (the clinical kind, and the teaching kind) have shamefully neglected to warn us about these psychopaths in our dating pool. I don’t like to make assumptions about my readers, but the existence of these abusers has been kept so hush-hush that you’re probably reading about them here for the first time.

Mind & Motivations: Understanding the Temptation to Offend

How it works: Feeding Frenzy is a form of Victim Blaming and Victim Silencing. Humans seem to understand at an innate level that powerlessness invites attack, whereas no one dares to make trouble for the strong. And so, if you say you’re having trouble with your housemate or neighbor, outsiders see that as an admission of weakness, and since weakness invites attack, a chain reaction occurs: Bystanders, even perfect strangers, say to themselves, “Someone else kicked him; therefore he must be a safe target; therefore I will kick him too.” This unleashes the Feeding Frenzy phenomenon, a kind of contagious “kick me” sign on the back of the victim. This is why most people aren’t able to listen nonjudgmentally, i.e. without joining the attack or without further victimizing the victim.

Why would a friend suddenly fail to be a friend and instead join forces with your enemy? Over the years I’ve known evil people of all kinds, and I’ve considered many theories of the Feeding Frenzy and how it works and the motives behind it.

You know the old joke about the two men being chased by a bear: One guy tells the other guy to “Run faster or the bear will catch you!”... Other guy says “I don’t have to out-run the bear, I just have to out-run you” — because predators will usually go for the easier target.
But what if it’s more devious than that? I mean if one runner weakens the other, and gets him to trip and fall, then the fallen guy becomes instant bear bait, and the survivor can make his escape.
That’s an interesting theory; but I feel it doesn’t explain all the possible motives.


So we may have to settle for the awareness that there are many reasons why people try to weaken you in your time of pain and need:
There may be many reasons why people kick you when you’re down, and that means there are many kinds of offenders:

• the Mental Child: the friend who tries to weaken you with bad advice, like telling you to react to bullying with ineffective methods like “Turning the Other Cheek”, or who reminds you to “Honor your father and mother” if you rightly complain about being abused at home. They have no experience with the problem. They haven’t thought it through. They’re thinking naïvely, not like adults, not like good skeptics: they haven’t outgrown the childhood belief that Rank Makes Right. They’re simply reciting the advice they were given, perhaps in kindergarten — sandbox advice that is useless in adult relationships.
• the Back-Stabbing Bear-Baiter: These are frenemies who figuratively trip you or stomp your foot (like my little friend Richard did, below) to make SURE you can’t and won’t out-run the bear.
• the Emotional Abuser, who refers to all (your) emotions as “noise” and “drama” and “manipulation”. Don’t expect any empathy from these people.
• its half-sibling, the Compulsive Bully: the psychopath who tries to upset you, and is freaking gleeful every time the abuse works and you burst into tears.
• the Abuser Imitator or the Abuse Re-Enactor: the new boyfriend who, when you disclose that you were raped or beaten by your ex, becomes sexually aroused and tries to do the same stuff to you — “to desensitize you,” he says. Your story of being abused gives him new ideas of things to try in the bedroom.
• the Latent Physical Abuser who responds to emotion by shouting “Stop that crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!”
• and at the extreme end, Shaken Baby Syndrome: the murdering parent who beats his infant child to death because the child won’t stop crying.

You’ll find a real-life story on each of these sick behaviors, and more, in the essay sections below.

People who seem to be powerful will be automatically respected. People who seem to be their victims will be automatically attacked. Onlookers and bystanders will find themselves instantly polarized and biased, like a nail struck by a magnet — because Identification with the Aggressor is contagious.

Opportunistic people believe Might Makes Right, and therefore, powerlessness signals the lack of all rights.

Little Richard and the Big Toe

Once upon a time, when I was eight years old, I had an ingrown toenail. It was mildly uncomfortable and I had a slight limp for a few days. That was bad enough — but then I made the mistake of telling my best friend Richard that my toe was sore. As a result, he stepped on my toe six times that day (something which he never did before nor after that day). Each time, he pretended it was an accident. After I got tired of him playing innocent for the sixth time, I chewed him out and went home, partly in disgust, partly to get the bleeding stopped.

Mathematicians will inform you that when someone stomps on your sore foot six times in a row but zero times on your other foot, the odds are 63 ÷ 64 = 98.4% that the behavior was NOT accidental, but rather, represented an INTENT to target your sore foot. Simple proof: Choose 6 coins; and flip them all at the same time — and call that a “trial”. Keep flipping the coins (all 6 at a time); eventually, you should arrive at a trial where all 6 coins come up heads. That will happen on average once in 2⁶ = 64 trials — because coins are truly random. But a friend who is seeking out your sore spots is not behaving randomly, and quickly reveals his intent.

Moral: Whenever someone kicks your sore spot, never believe them when they say it was unintentional. When you tell someone you’re in pain and he kicks you, it is a reflex. More examples follow.

We Were Three

A very young girl gets sexually molested by a strange man hanging around the playground. She tells her father. Instead of killing the molester, her worthless shrimp of a father beats the crap out of her.

He beats up the victim. His own daughter. The innocent party. The easier target.

That’s just one of the incidents in Nancy Updike’s podcast “We Were Three”, ep. 2, 10:01–13:07. From the producers of Serial (at podcasts.apple.com).

Revictimization, and The Survivor Effect

The crucial clue appeared in front of me about 20 years ago. I was sitting in on a domestic violence group when the most curious conversation about a shared experience came up:
(The website no longer exists and I couldn’t find it archived, so the following text has been heavily anonymized and generalized to conceal identities.)

Person A said:

My ex-bf started sexually abusing me before we got married. It began when I told my ex about the incest in our family (a trusted family member molested me). My bf was the first person I trusted enough to tell about it. My bf seemed sympathetic and said all the right things. But after I told him, my bf did a complete Jekyll-and-Hyde: He threw a blanket over my head and raped me. “It will de-sensitize you,” he said. “It will help you cope,” he said.

Person B said:

Me too! But it was my [other elder male relative]. The molestation started when I was a teenager. I told my parents but they didn’t believe me. Years later when I made the mistake of telling my abusive ex about the incest, my ex forced me to do exactly the same creepy stuff!!

Person C said:

Everybody I turned to took advantage of me while I was down, in SO many different ways.

When you confide in someone, you never know how they will react.

Gay people go through this all the time, when they “come out”.
They never know who will support them and who will abandon them.
I’m finding it’s the same for abuse survivors.

Years ago I confided in a friend: I told him that someone had abused me.

At that moment, a new facial expression came over him.
His eyes slowly closed, and a smirk appeared on his face,
and his tone of voice became one of “Yeah, right. (God, not another whiner)”
and he said “Aaaaaaand what is it you think they did to you?”

I gave him the dirtiest look — to let him know that he had just pressed the wrong button —

and with just a hint of a growl in my voice, I said “😠 Excuse me? What do I THINK they did?”

“Well, yeah! I mean what did they do?” he asked, backpedaling as fast as he could.

I said “😠 Why do you ask?” but my tone of voice was telling him he’d better break off his little peer-pressure attack.
And he did. But I made a mental note not to confide in him again.

Since then, I’ve seen that facial expression and I’ve heard that doubting attitude in other people.

Sometimes I’ll hear a quote that’s too good not to write down, so I run to my notebook and save it on paper. Many of these quotes come from reality TV.
I love reality TV. It’s a great laboratory for studying the dark side of human personality.
As you may know, many of these shows are based on the idea of “voting someone off the island”.
In 2003, a few shows experimented with the idea of letting the banished castaways come back for an encore.
Here’s a conversation that caught my ear:

Andrew: I don’t want any of those Outcast [3rd tribe] people getting any power in our tribe.
If they were voted out of the other tribe, there must have been a damn good reason.
I don’t want them reversing any of those decisions.

   — CBS’s Survivor, October 30, 2003

Curiously, this dynamic also occurred in CBS’s Big Brother that year. Whenever a voted-out housemate returned, secret discussions stressed that that housemate had to go. But I don’t remember hearing it articulated as well as Andrew put it.
The formula, the imperative, seems to be:

→ “What was done to them before, must be done to them again.
We don’t need to know or understand the reasons. It must be done to them again, for no other reason than it was done to them before.”

I knew quite well that it happens with verbal abuse:
when victims mention having been abused, bystanders will often have a “Jekyll-and-Hyde moment”
and try to add insult to injury.
But until I read the above posts, I had no idea that this applies also to physical abuse.
Sounds like insensitive people have an (instinctive?) drive to re-create the crimes of others.
(I knew they would try to make the victim feel worse. I never dreamed they would try to re-create the crime.)

I suppose it’s the way abusive people mark their territory: first they sniff around to see where other dogs have done it. Then they do their business on the same spot.

It’s good to find people who truly sympathize. It’s why we have support groups.
But whenever you tell a friend you were abused,
you play Russian Roulette with your relationships.

Lately I try to keep my support people and my friend people separate.
(I.e. I don’t ask either to do what the other is good at.)

We’re not the first ones to notice the Customary Victim phenomenon.
Look at this little gem:

Let thy discontents be thy secrets; if the world knows them ’twill despise thee and increase them.

— Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1741)

Mom and the Padlock

When I was in the 6th grade, there was a minor break-in and theft at my middle school. Someone in the boys’ locker room had picked the combination locks on at least two lockers and pilfered the contents, shirts and shorts, plain grey gym gear. In other words, nothing expensive was taken. To create confusion, the thief swapped the padlocks so that the rightful owners couldn’t get their own lockers open.

One of the lockers was mine. I went and got the coach, who grabbed the long-handled jaws-of-death pliers and he cut the intruding lock off my locker.

New clothing and a new padlock would cost a few dollars. It was obviously the kind of crime that happens all the time and wouldn’t be solved, because — Where to begin the investigation? There were no eyewitnesses and no suspects. However, as I would discover later that day, *I* would be named as the prime suspect. One authority figure would decide that *I* was at fault. That accuser was my own mother.

I arrived home after school and told my mother what had happened, and told her I would need new gym equipment…………… And my mother went berserk. My mother exploded in a rage. Over the next half hour, — I forget which names I was called, but “stupid” and “idiot” were known to be in my mother’s vocabulary.
I thought the shaming and snarling and berating and dirty looks would never stop.
My locker must have been broken into, she said, because I had locked it improperly.

First my mother spouted a list of all the mistakes I maybe made when locking my locker, until she found one I didn’t know how to disprove, and so she settled on that as the cause and screamed at me some more. Because that allowed her to find the conclusion she wanted, which was that *I* was the problem. Meanwhile THE THIEF (remember him?) never got verbally abused by my mother.
As for my dad, he enabled her tirade with his silence.

Unfortunately this was the first sign of a lifelong problem with my mother: she felt that attacking her own family was an acceptable, ethical first choice.

UPDATE: In hindsight, it’s fair to say I was locking my combo lock incorrectly. I didn’t know that simply clicking the shackle back into the lock isn’t enough — you have to then spin the dial to scramble the tumblers, because otherwise the tumblers remain lined up and the shackle can be pulled right back out. My parents hadn’t told me that, because my parents had weird, non-scientific beliefs about how kids learn: namely, my parents believed kids learn by a magical process called “maturity”: according to this folk theory, kids don’t have to be taught — kids auto-magically gain all sorts of complex knowledge just by passing certain birthdays 🙄. By the way, Master Lock seems to believe this too: click Master Lock’s how-to page and you’ll see that the advice to spin the dial after locking is still missing from their instruction sheet and from their how-to video. At least my Mom provided this bit of wisdom to me — after the theft, with gloating and ridicule and angry shouting and that snarling tone of voice that means “You’re supposed to know this stuff without being told.” Better than nothing, I guess?

It would take me many years to figure out that my own mother had been the bully in her school and probably a petty thief as well. The signs were all there: her habit of turning on her family with no restraint; her oft-mentioned hatred for kids who tattle.
And then there was her theft disorder: her total lack of respect for other people’s property: the number of my belongings she tried to sneak into the trash; or my most favorite shirts and gadgets, which she stole from me and sold for a few dollars at the consignment thrift shop (as an act of spite or revenge, or simple theft? who knows — We did NOT need the money). We didn’t think to call it kleptomania at the time…. but in hindsight it was clearly abnormal behavior. (Apparently this mental illness is uncommon but not unheard of — click to see similar cases: 1, 2, esp. comment.)

I always say, “People defend those whose guilt they share.” Today I wonder: Did my own mother once pick a lock and steal something from a classmate? It would certainly explain how she had such an instant, ready-made, full-throated defense of the child who broke into my locker, complete with multiple lawyer-like theories of how the victim was to blame for “enabling” the crime. Was my mother caught in the act? Had she been stewing over the “unfair” way in which she was caught and punished? Did she spend her school years dwelling on it, painting testimonial pictures? Did she get together with friends to bitch about it, to plot revenge on the tattling locker owner who supposedly “got her in trouble”? Did they conjure up alternative theories of ethics in which the break-in was just children having fun? All that rage bottled up inside her, until 11-year-old me happened to step on the trigger and it went off in my face.

But that last paragraph is all questions, all guesswork and extrapolation. My mother’s explosive tirade was bad enough, and speaks for itself. What monster treats a child like that? It was my first lesson that Mom wasn’t there for me and wouldn’t take my side, and that I couldn’t safely tell her much about my life.

I learned that I couldn’t turn to my own family for defense, even on such a trivial matter. So I can easily imagine one very big reason why victims of more serious crimes, like robbery and rape, often don’t tell their families nor the authorities.

(filed under: child abuse; emotional abuse; disregard for the boundaries of others)

As Bad as Flunking

I’ll never forget the day I forgot to take the test to get into graduate school. The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) is an entrance requirement for many American and Canadian colleges. Somehow I just spaced it and forgot it was exam day. Obviously I was crushed and demoralized and kicking myself because this meant my educational plans and career were on hold for another 6 months! Never mind the loss of the test fee. How lucky was I that my roommate was nearby, to kick me when I was down: to make LOUD un-supportive remarks like “😠 You think everything is a disaster!!!” From that reaction and from other problems in his character, I was able to figure out he was no friend, and I got out of that house.

Update: A few days later I was running errands on campus when I came to a T-junction in a hallway.
I could turn left, or I could turn right.
However *I* was able to move forward — because someone had stuck a giant poster on the wall ahead of me, letting me know that
Sylvan Learning Center was offering the GRE electronically, two days a week! 😳

I called them immediately and signed up. 🙂 I took the test a few days later. Disaster averted. 🎓

But yes: In most cases, forgetting to take an important exam IS a disaster. Only insensitive shmucks would dare to criticize you for taking such a situation seriously.

Three People I Used to Trust

Why does sadness often trigger an angry attack? Why do abusive people think that your time of pain is a time for them to be UNkind? Why do they choose that moment to blast you with their worst criticisms?
Why would any “friend” see your moment of insecurity or vulnerability as a weakness to be exploited?

A certain defective personality type (narcissists? psychopaths? plain old abusers?) responds to displays of sadness with vicious attacks.
The puzzle pieces came together for me in 2003,
when I noticed the pattern in three people on three occasions over a span of ten years:
All I had to do was mention I had been feeling sad,
and bang, they launched instant attacks of verbal abuse.
One offender was a friend and co-worker;
one was a best friend, and a formerly trusted relative did it too.
I have three examples. Briefly:

1. I once told my mother I had been feeling sad that week, and out of the blue she erupted in an angry tirade of criticism.
2. You remember the story of my critical housemate and the GRE exam (above).
3. I once lost a best friend of 25 years, after I took the risk of asking for his opinion
   on a romantic question. I was unhappy about dating someone who didn’t seem interested,
   so I asked my friend for his interpretation.
   But my friend saw this as his opportunity to have a “Jekyll-and-Hyde moment”:
   He saw my time of pain and indecision as an appropriate time for him to turn sarcastic and belittling.
   Like my problems were some big effing joke to him!
   That was the last straw, and I look back on that as the end of our friendship.

So after a lot of Internet searches, I wrote to Annette Stoody, EdD., an educator and school principal who wrote a doctoral dissertation with the most interesting title, “How Bullies Pick Their Victims”. I asked:

It’s been said that bullies get a “high” off of seeing the victim upset.
But is there any evidence or literature pointing to the opposite cause-and-effect relationship
between sadness and bullying?
In other words, any evidence that bullies are drawn to (as potential new victims) people who are already sad?

(I wondered this recently when I looked into my diary
and noticed three separate instances, years apart, in which
I was verbally abused by a coworker, close friend, or immediate family member
right after I disclosed that I had been feeling unhappy.
Began to wonder if unhappiness is frequently a trigger for the abusive behavior of others?
Might be a hitherto unknown phenomenon needing more study....Or a well-known one which *I* should study....)

Dr. Stoody answered:

My study related to characteristics that “bullies” attribute to their
“victims.” That is, how they conceptualize others (in particular, targets of
their aggression) in terms of dispositional or traitlike characterizations.

I developed a questionnaire and administered it to a rather limited number
of middle school students who met my definition of “bully” in order to
attempt to elicit these characteristics.

There were several perceived characteristics that ALL of the “bullies”
attributed to their targets: forward lean, lack of attractiveness, too eager
to please (adults especially), marked tension or nervousness.

There were other characteristics that were attributed by the MAJORITY of
“bullies,” and one of them was appearing SAD or UNHAPPY. This aspect was
supported in the literature by Anderson, 1994; James et al., 1994; Olweus,
1993; Parkhurst & Asher, 1992; Volling et al., 1993; Younger & Daniels,
1992.

… thus opening up a whole new world of research and Yes answers to my question 🙂

Proving Causation: Longitudinal Studies to the Rescue

So: As said above, a study found that bullies describe their victims as sad or unhappy. In fact a search through Google Scholar found several studies that reached the same conclusion.
Now: If you were alert enough to object that correlation is not causation, and that therefore we can’t know if the victims were sad before or after the bullying, then I have good news for you:
The early correlational studies paved the way for later longitudinal studies.
A longitudinal study is, briefly, a study in which researchers stay in touch with the participants for many days or months or years, asking each participant the same questions every few days or weeks or months, to find out when the participants:

• started or stopped being bullied at school,
• started or stopped feeling sad, and
• started or stopped being treated badly at home.

Longitudinal studies are expensive to conduct, requiring a huge staff and huge funding to collect mountains of data. Because these studies look at how data evolve over time, looking at what happened first, they CAN in fact tease apart correlation from causation: they CAN figure out what caused what. The studies are made possible by the latest computers, using time-series analysis and graduate-level matrix algebra. Statistical analysis is like a microscope: the larger the number of participants, the sharper the focus and the more detailed the picture. Large studies make small details visible; and the shady behaviors which people engage in in secret leave detectable ripples in a sea of data.

Spillover

The findings from the new bullying studies have been exciting — and shocking:

• A 2011 study gathered evidence on a daily basis, by asking 578 students to fill in a diary every night for 14 days, to report events of conflict (at home and at school) and their emotional states. The study found that “Adolescents experienced more peer conflict on days in which they argued with parents or other family members, and vice versa. Effect of family conflict further spilled over into peer relationships the next day and 2 days later, whereas peer conflict predicted only the following day family conflict. Adolescents’ emotional distress partially explained these short-term spillovers between family and peer conflict.”
  See Grace H. Chung, Lisa Flook, & Andrew J. Fuligni, “Reciprocal Associations Between Family and Peer Conflict in Adolescents’ Daily Lives”, Child Development, vol. 82, issue 5 (2011) doi link.
• A 2018 study on 9770 students in the Netherlands found that many children who are bullied in school get treated coldly by their parents in response, when they get home (remember my mother and the padlock?), and cold parenting at home causes a further increase in peer victimization in school! So, modern number crunching has been able to detect a feeding frenzy phenomenon in which bullies and parents act together to abuse the victim upon seeing that the victim is sad or unhappy, a kind of double jeopardy, perhaps even a vicious cycle.
  See Tessa M. L. Kaufman, Tina Kretschmer, Gijs Huitsing, and René Veenstra, “Caught in a vicious cycle? Explaining bidirectional spillover between parent-child relationships and peer victimization”, Development and Psychopathology (2019), pp. 1–10. doi link

Using interviews and diaries, the researchers were able to reconstruct exactly how the process unfolds. The key connecting the contagion, the researchers found, is sadness:

1. Child is picked on in school.
2. Child goes home sad.
3. Family sees their child is sad, and…
4. Child experiences hostile parenting from the child’s own parents(!), who turn rejecting and cold toward their victimized child and withdraw their affection…

… Devastating proof that Feeding Frenzy is real.

This proves Stoody’s finding (that bullies choose sad kids as their victims),
and it proves my theory of the Feeding Frenzy.
We got vindication.
So we should celebrate, right? The news is good, right? 🙂

Well… It means:

• We have understood humanity correctly, but…
• Humans are beastly :^| Some more than others.

And the news is about to get far, far worse —
because the 2011 and 2018 studies (above) discovered a third effect (briefly mentioned above) which is more horrible than anything I ever could have contemplated:

• The child’s increased sadness about home life causes the child to be victimized even harder in school.

To put it another way, the recent studies show that not only can school bullying trigger a deterioration in the victim’s home life (by triggering cold parenting and withdrawn affection), but there is a reciprocal effect: victims who are treated coldly at home tend to be bullied more in school. This suggests that the fuller answer to the question “How do bullies choose their victims?” is that not only do bullies seek out as victims classmates who won’t defend themselves, but bullies prefer as victims classmates whose entire families won’t defend them. And that, I propose, is the real meaning of bullying.

There has long been a suspicion that this defenselessness is detectable by bullies.
Dan Olweus (1993) expressed hunches that victims somehow signal an unwillingness to fight back, thus “inviting” bullying (see Bullying in School); but in “Victimization by Peers: Antecedents and Long Term Outcomes” (1993) he stated “All in all, the above results support the view that the major causal influence is from victimization to depression-related variables, and not the other way around” (p. 333; italics in the original — note that he says “the major”, not “the only”).

A study by Frazer et al. (2018) yields a not-dissimilar finding: Parents with anger management issues tend to have more children who suffer from peer victimization. This is not surprising, given the other findings on cold and hostile parenting.
See Andrew L. Frazer, John L. Cooley, Paula J. Fite, and Jon Poquiz, “Anger inhibition moderates the link between parental psychological control and peer victimization”, Merrill–Palmer Quarterly, Vol. 64, no. 3, July 2018, pp. 376–396.

Some thoughts on detecting defenselessness:

Honeybees get respect because they have stingers. You may also have seen this other insect called a hover fly or bee fly (Google image search). Hover flies have black-and-yellow stripes that make them look like wasps and yellow jackets, the most aggressive bees. But unlike bees, hover flies don’t have stingers. They’re basically fake bees, using mimicry to get respect. There are certain “tells” that you can look for to identify a hover fly: First off, honeybees ignore us: honeybees have a calm demeanor that comes from the awareness that nobody in his right mind is going to mess with them, and this is why you can walk through a flower garden full of honeybees (and even bumblebees) and never get stung or even bothered: bees largely don’t react to people, as though bees don’t even see us. But next time you meet a hover fly, try this experiment: raise your index finger (your pointer finger) and move it slowly toward the hover fly. A real bee will ignore you until you get very close; but a hover fly will notice you at once, and will back off and hover at a cautious distance, keeping a close watch on your fingertip. The hover fly lacks the confidence of a bee.
Some researchers (see Olweus, in Bullying in School) suggest that victimized children likewise betray insecurity or a lack of confidence when tested by a bully-type classmate.

So What’s the Deal with this War on Sad People?

I’m not sure, but one of the deeper findings of Kaufman et al. was that parents reacted about as harshly to depression as they did to learning that their child had been misbehaving in school or bullying others! It’s like parents are saying “I’d better not ever find out you’ve been SAD at school! 😠 Because your sadness is an offense against ME PERSONALLY and I will turn off the love right now!!” Depressed children actually get reprimanded and picked on by their own parents, as if these children had done something wrong! So I’m not being hyperbolic when I say there’s a WAR on sad people.

Another curious finding: Kids who were victimized at school experienced almost no spillover damage to their home relationships unless they came home sad or anxious or with a report of misbehaving at school.
→ In other words: Those students who kept their school problems quiet or secret did not (on average) lose the love of their families. This is seen in Figure 3 in Kaufman et al., in the l-o-n-g curving arrow reaching from Victimization T2 to Parent-child relationships T4. The arrow is labeled with the association strengths “.02/.01” and no asterisks (researchers use asterisks to communicate that “this connection is significant”; numbers without asterisks mean “no connection proven”).

Should You Tell Your Family and Teachers When You’ve Been Victimized?

I honestly don’t know what to recommend. Many grown-ups have blazingly stupid beliefs about how to respond to bullying: their responses, which they learned from their parents and teachers before them, usually amount to:

• Convenient excuses like “The victim is (I claim) always at least half at fault, so stop antagonizing the bully.”
• “I don’t have time for this. Handle it between the two of you.”
• Defenses of verbal abuse: “Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. 👶🏻 ”
• Evasions like “I don’t see the problem,” or…
• Looking the other way at just the right moment, and then claiming “I didn’t see that happen, so I can’t do anything.”
• Fawning over and cooing and soothing the victim — but doing and saying nothing to stop the repeat-offending perp. As though they love the sight of someone who’s sad. On the surface this looks like helping, but it’s pretty sick if you know about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) and the Sadness Fetish.

That generation passed its folk beliefs and evasive methods down to the next generation. Speaking from experience: Most adults just don’t want to know and just don’t want to intervene, and so, they will bend and re-interpret all your evidence to justify their inaction; and they will turn up the snark and the snarling until the victim stops asking for help.

In times of trouble, you should certainly seek out helpful, empathetic people, preferably those who have helped you before. But if anyone joins the Feeding Frenzy against you, you should have a very long memory for acts of treason.
Should you trust unproven friends and family members? I regret to say I have seen no data to help you decide: It could go well and it could go badly. I wish I could give you a short list of signs to look for, to help you identify potential helpers. Maybe this book chapter will give a researcher the idea to do a study. How about it, psychology departments? 🙂 How can we identify a helper? Are there any tells?

Might Makes Right

Many friends will side against you once they hear you’re in a disagreement with a superior, and will instantly urge you to kowtow, even if you’re being wronged or mistreated.

Many humans seem pre-wired to confuse power with goodness. We are pre-programmed with the angelic naïveté to believe that our police and our leaders could never possibly do anything corrupt or unethical or self-serving. This sets us up to respond to abuse and violence by kowtowing to them, when we should be defending ourselves and exposing the wrongdoers. And we should be aware that when we go to the authorities, and the authorities dismiss our complaints of being wronged, that’s not their higher understanding of justice, that’s just their wish to be lazy.

Case Study #1: Stereotypes about Rank: Is Abuse of Power Ever Really “Unintentional”?

Here’s a simple educational case study: A user on Reddit asked if filing a grievance against an employer is a career-ending move. The forum is tiny and the web page is small, and yet, the question attracted THREE people who rudely dropped hints implying that maybe the poster was about to write a trivial complaint. By the way, you’ll notice that the original poster didn’t even give details, which means the replies were making accusations without evidence!

Let’s analyze those replies — I’ve added my own comments in column 2:

In all, this thread is a beautiful example of “accusation by stereotype” and “rank-based justice”: the posters revealed their stereotyped belief that employees (betas) do stupid things — whereas managers (Alphas) do unintentional things. Watch for this pattern of pro-management, anti-worker bias whenever power misbehaves.

In web forums, all you have to do is complain, and the human sharks get pulled in like magnets.

By the way: Giving someone a “preemptive warning just in case you’re an idiot” is offensive. Polite people do not suggest someone’s complaint is trivial at least until they’ve seen the evidence.

Full details at Reddit.

Bullies Who Cause Suicide

Bullies who kill their victims are especially loud and aggressive. After one bully drives someone to suicide, a pack of bully sympathizers will often gather to say the most horrible things about the victim.
You can always identify a bully by the pack of beliefs he tries to spread:

1. That people who kill themselves are mentally ill;
2. that people who commit suicide are “selfish”,
3. or that they’re doing it “to get attention”.
4. That the bullies who drove them to suicide are none of the above!
5. The Just World Fallacy, which is the belief that your happiness is a measure of your ethics, and therefore,
6. that sad people deserve to die.

And isn’t that really what makes a bully a bully: the belief that people who don’t stand up for themselves deserve to be kicked around? That they deserve to die, even?

People Who Defend Evil

Q. But why should I stand up for victims? Why should I help them fight off their attackers? Isn’t revenge wrong?

A. The science of psychology makes us aware of a phenomenon called “identification with the aggressor”:

1. People tend to automatically defend persons who superficially resemble them in some way: religion, nationality, race, having the same job or doing the same kind of work, having the same employer, being members of the same political party.
2. Some people will stand up for anyone whose guilt they share.

• q and r are friends, or when
• q and r are similar in some way, or when
• q and r have committed the same crime.

• q refuses to discuss the evidence against r,
• q calls the evidence “insults” and “lies” and “gossip” and “perceptions”,
• q calls correction of r “hate”,
• q calls justice “revenge”.

What scares me is not the people who believe in revenge, but those who defend wrongdoing at any cost.

Most people who whine about “revenge” are defending a wrongdoer and they know it. They think they can manipulate you out of defending yourself by using religiously loaded language.

Identification with the Aggressor means agreeing with the stronger party in order to be on the side that’s winning.

Why Don’t I Give Etiquette Advice?

I got out of the advice business when I noticed that most people don’t have manners questions — they really want to know “How can I get out from under the thumb of someone who’s dominating me?” or “How can I feel better about the fact that I dominate people?” Rudeness isn’t the problem — power and bullying are. In addition, I came to the conclusion that most acts of rudeness aren’t acts of ignorance, preventable by education, but deliberate crimes of opportunity, inflicted on people who seem unlikely to fight back.

I stopped worrying about identifying rude people when I noticed that the bigger problem is with Jekyll-and-Hyde people, the kind of offenders who can’t be identified because they score well on tests and pass all the screenings you can devise, and then they turn on you without warning, often at times when you need them most.

Door Dent and Dash

I remember the time I was at the grocery store, about to drive away with my groceries. A young woman in another car drove up and parked to my right and, completely oblivious to the fact that I was there, banged her car door into my passenger-side door, not once, but multiple times! I left a note on her windshield, where I mentioned her actions, and I added “See if you can find the damage I did to YOUR car.” And having thus committed an act of psychological warfare, I drove away (I felt that no actual damage to her car was necessary to get my point across). Later, when I told my “best friend” about this, I got lectured for my vindictiveness. My so-called “friend” said nothing against the woman’s actions. Apparently, twenty-year-olds feel that NO act of standing up for yourself is allowed.

Moral of the Story: Some friends want you to stand up for yourself — IN THEORY. But every time you stand up for yourself IN PRACTICE, they’ll defend your attacker.
He actually had the nerve to say I should have been POLITE to her. 🙄
He wanted me to correct her politely. Like that would work. Like he was flamingly stupid about how evil people operate.
You see what he was saying: that I wasn’t polite enough to someone who was super-rude to me. That I’m not supposed to create dis-incentives when people treat me like dirt.

Dafuq I’m not.

Epilogue: I can tell you what happened to the offender after that day: Every time her engine acted up, she wondered if *I* made that happen, because of the way she deliberately dented my car. Every time she found a new scratch in the paint, or a new chip in the windshield, or a tire went flat, or the muffler failed — every day until that car rusted out, she felt the consequences of her actions — all triggered by a slip of paper I placed under her wiper.

What did I take from her? What exactly did I damage? Her sense of security. It was an equal trade, if you think about it.

Secret Rules: How the Human Pecking Order Works

• Only Alphas are allowed to play Tit for Tat. betas are lectured to play Turn The Other Cheek.
• All children are betas — and they know it.
• When children grow up and try to age out of the beta role, their young playmates will try to hold them back, by reminding them of the kindergarten rules. This is one kind of beta herding.
• betas are not to be told that they live in a caste system with a double standard stacked against them. Only Alphas are allowed to know this.
• If an Alpha offends or harms a beta, the beta must be told that the offense is all in his head. The offense should be watered down by calling it a “perceived offense” or an “alleged offense” — because only Alphas are allowed to have a validated reality. Because accusations against an Alpha are always wrong, even when factually correct.
• betas must forgive Alphas immediately. The beta should even apologize for getting in the Alpha’s way.
• betas are told not to take themselves too seriously.

By the way, you’ll probably notice that in my writings, the word “Alpha” is always spelled with a capital A, while the word “beta” is always spelled with a lower-case b, even when it begins a sentence or a paragraph. Because Alphas are predestined to be in charge and on top, and betas must mind their place. According to Alphas, that’s the way it has always been. Alphas really don’t see why you would object.

betas must never get angry; and if an Alpha makes a beta angry, the victim (not the offender) must apologize. beta parents teach their children this lesson during childhood. In addition, beta parents may teach their children that it’s ok to stand up for themselves — but this is only theory, as demonstrated by the fact that if the child ever defends himself and his parents find out, they lecture him on the importance of restraint and humility and getting along with others. If the child answers “But what about what the Alpha child did to me first?” he is punished for talking back. Logic can be so annoying when it has no power to back it up.
In practice, beta children are taught to never raise a hand to an Alpha and never raise their voices. betas grow up feeling guilty for defending themselves. betas are taught that these are the most serious offenses a beta can commit.

beta children learn that their beta parents are not to be called on as defenders. beta children are taught that attracting the wrath of an Alpha bully brings shame and inconvenience onto the beta victim’s family. The victim’s family will join the Alpha bully in picking on their own child. “You should have kept your head down and stayed below the radar,” they tell their child.
The child replies, “But the radar is aimed at my stomach!”
“Shut up and get back on your knees,” they say. “Learn to accept the things which (we have decided) you can’t change.”

Or to parody Star Wars: “The Alpha isn’t bothering anybody (important). He can go about his business.”

About this Book

If you’ve ever (in your entire life) been a victim of anything (and who hasn’t, at some point?), you’ll be pressured to shut up about it — at the time, and forever after. If I’m going to write a book about Abuse, obviously I will be told to shut up about most of the contents(!), and quite often. The most frequent reason given for such shushing will no doubt be the fact that such personal recollections are, nowadays (in the age of Wikipedia) pooh-poohed as “personal research”, in sharp contrast to the modern activist tradition of saying “We do not show solidarity with abusers by silencing victims.”

This book is a work of activism. I was going to call this book a work of observation, doing for human studies what Jane Goodall did for the study of chimpanzees, documenting the beastly nature of the species — however, when writing about beastly humans, one does tend to find oneself silenced fairly often by those with opposing ideologies, and usually (I suspect) by those with their own secret histories of treating other humans abusively. Such people wish to keep their secrets secret. When such people want you to shut up, simple factual reporting becomes a political act.

And so, it is in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, who said (and I paraphrase) “I make it a habit not to subject my work to the editing opinions of others,” I am embracing the self-publishing model, to make good on my guarantee to you (Dear Reader) that this book will be filtered through the biases of the fewest humans possible. Fewer cooks, less spoiling of the broth, you get the idea. I will have my say, and I’ll tell you what people really are. Maybe you disagree with something I’ve written? Maybe you have a different viewpoint? Fine: go write your own book; no one’s stopping you: this book is proof.

Repetition Compulsion: a quack theory

A favorite theory of victim blamers is the century-old theory of Repetition Compulsion, which claims that people actually seek out partners who remind them of their past abusers. Here’s how the Freudians painted the picture: Boy meets girl. Boy abuses girl. Girl escapes from boy. Girl says “I miss my abusive boyfriend and want more of that abuse in my life. (Never mind the fact that I proved my sanity by escaping from him, which took so much of my thought and effort!)” Allegedly, according to the outdated theory, the choice to date abusers is intentional.

Here’s what actually happens, explained by Feeding Frenzy: Girl meets boy. Boy abuses girl. Girl escapes from boy. Girl meets new boy. Girl tells new boy, “My old boyfriend raped and beat and abused me.” This gives the new boyfriend ideas for things to try in the bedroom. Thus, new boy mysteriously starts behaving just like old boy!
And the predictable conclusion: Girl blames herself, saying “I guess I just seek these people out. My bad!”
So she didn’t have to find a new abuser — all she had to do was to find a new man, a man who had the Feeding Frenzy tendency, and to give him knowledge of the abuser’s tool kit. Contagious abuse did the rest of the work.

Let’s have one thing clear: You are not responsible for the sharks that choose to swim in the dating pool. You are not responsible for the wrongdoing and poor choices of others. When dating, beware of false friends who try to convince you that you somehow purposely attract the wrong kind of people. Tell those disloyal friends that victim blaming is a character flaw and you won’t put up with it. Because just as there’s a pool for rejected lovers, there’s a pool for rejected friends.

The theory of Repetition Compulsion has been replaced by the much more provable and evidence-backed theory of the compulsion to blame victims.

What (Not) to Say to Abuse Victims

Friends and family sometimes make a bad situation worse by saying the wrong thing.
When talking to a victim of abuse, it is considered rude to say:

• “I’m sure the abuser meant well — maybe you just misunderstood.”
• “You (not the abuser) need to change your ways.”
• “Maybe you did something to deserve it.”
• Statements that mean “I don’t have a problem with what was done to you.”
• Statements that mean “I secretly agree with what was done to you.”
• “You shouldn’t let it get to you” instead of “You were right to stand up for yourself. You shouldn’t let people mistreat you.”
• “Are you sure you’re not overreacting a little?”

The best relationships are the ones that double as support groups. Persons who have never been abused tend to find abuse unthinkable, and so have an insensitive tendency to actually SIDE WITH the abusers, especially if those abusers were parents, guardians, or other authority figures. Simply mention that you were abused and they turn on you and defend the abuser and go into Lecturing Mode, because obviously (to them) you’re an ignorant whiner who needs to be educated on how the world works. Isn’t it amazing? People who have never walked in your shoes still think they can tell you how to tie the laces.

Red Flags: Words and Phrases Often Used by Offenders.

• When someone attacks or mistreats you, your “friend” tells you to let the offender off the hook because “👶🏻 Revenge is wrong.” Of course, your “friend” does not give this same lecture to the offender.
• Warns you to “Be the better person.” Does not give your abuser the same warning.
• You tell a friend or therapist or policeman that you’re being abused, and the listener turns overbearing or displays a flash (or more) of impatience or anger at you, like they find you annoying. You may get the feeling that the abuser and the listener are all on the same side and that none is better than the other. If a cop pulls this on you when you report a crime, turn to an attorney for help. If a friend does it, tell them the friendship is on hold until conditions improve. If a therapist misbehaves like this (some therapists do!), that is unprofessional and unforgivable; fire him or her on the spot.
• Finds a way to say something unkind about the victim.
• The politeness ends, and the snark and insults and disregard for your boundaries begin.
  (Some “friends” and family members will see this as their opportunity to turn flip and sarcastic and to use that lecturing tone. How sensitive and caring.)
• Jekyll-and-Hyde moments: flashes of annoyance and anger at the victim. For example, becomes snotty and critical if the victim reports the abuse using imperfect spelling and grammar.
• Many people who report abuse are told that they need to forgive — an action which only serves the abuser’s interests.
• Says “You need to control your emotions.”
• Stands up for the Overdog in every conflict.

Euphemisms for Defending a Bully or Kowtowing to a Bully:

When defending yourself against a bully, watch out for disloyal friends who lecture you about the importance of:

• being a good citizen
• not burning your bridges behind you
• politeness
• professionalism
• teamwork; being a team player

Victim-Weakening Propaganda. Pecking Order Reinforcement Tactics.

Things abusers and their defenders say to groom their victims to accept abuse without complaining:

• Pressures you not to call abuse abuse.
• Finds a way to paint each of the abuser’s actions as normal and reasonable, and therefore not abuse.

• Advice which no effective adult believes: “By fighting back, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.”
• “Pick your battles.”
• “Grow up.”
• “If you fight back, you’re lowering yourself to their level.”
• Childish understanding of how bullying and abuse work: “👶🏻 People can’t hurt you unless you let them.” “👶🏻 Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
• Junk Psychology: “People are as happy as they want to be — the problem is, YOU just don’t want to be happy.”
• Blatant kindergarten falsehoods about conflict: “If you fight back, you’re making your attacker stronger.”
• La-la-la plugging my ears, or Pretending to Be Blind: “I don’t see the problem.”
• Assertions of dominance over you: Giving you orders: “Move on.” “Get over it.” Grammarians call this the imperative mood.
• Insulting your values: When you say you’re going to blow the whistle and defend yourself and call an attorney, your “friend” says “What good do you think that’s going to do?” “Good luck with your Don Quixote crap.”
• Changing the focus: “Other people have it worse than you have it.”
• Trivialization:
  • “You’re blowing this out of proportion.”
  • “I can’t believe you’re making such a big deal out of this!” (Translation: “Learn to see your problems as unimportant. Like I do.”)
  • “What they said to you is only words. I can’t believe you’re giving away your power by letting it bother you like this.” (Translation: “I want you to believe that the defective one is you.”)
  • After you explain that what your abuser did was abuse, your “friend” says “👶🏻 You just didn’t like it.”
• Gaslighting: Shifting blame by pathologizing the victim: Saying that the bully isn’t the problem — the problem is that the “victim” overreacts or has abnormal brain wiring or chemistry:
  • Referring to the abuse as “perceived abuse”. (Abusers use this tactic to call the victim delusional.)
  • Spreading the victim-blaming lie that all depression is caused by abnormal chemistry or defeatist beliefs. Patients who say “This always happens to me” are instantly accused of exaggerating — especially by young therapists who have well-paying jobs and stable marriages and therefore don’t have to know that most workplaces and most of the dating pool are based on exploitation.
  • Notice this: Depression, which is a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances, is often denigrated by falsely calling it a “mental health” issue. Look at the gaslighting in that sentence, the suggestion that victimization makes someone insane. Notice the Feeding Frenzy in that. But notice also: You never hear about bullies and abusers (who CAUSE the depression) being called mentally ill. Like they’re too powerful or too precious to accuse or something. It’s time for that to change. It’s time for abusers and bullies to be the ones recognized as insane and dangerous. It’s time for their victims to be the protected ones. (See the related Dan Olweus quote, below.)

• Instead of helping you with the problem, begins correcting your grammar and spelling.

Attempts to silence the victim, using mind games and childhood beliefs:

• “👶🏻 Well, have you tried talking to them?” (Translation: “My mommy said this to me when I was four.”)
  

  Do you suppose Churchill’s mother ever said “Well, Winston dear, maybe you just need to talk to your little friend Adolf…. Start getting along with him, instead of using violence to solve your problems. Now go play nicely, dear.” 🙄

• “Fighting back is revenge.” (Translation: Same as above.)
• “You should treat people the way you’d like to be treated!” (Comeback: “Don’t ever piss on me and call it the Golden Rule.”)
• “When life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade!” (Comeback: “Don’t ever pee on me and tell me it’s a beverage.”)

Psychiatric Put-Downs:

• Refers to your fears or complaints as “paranoid”.

Miscellaneous:

• Silencing with Ego: Presenting self as a great example: “It happened to me, and you don’t hear me complaining or crying about it.”
• Fantasy Accusations and Blame-Shifting: “Maybe you caused the problem by doing … something!” Notice the lack of evidence and the lack of fact-checking.
  “Maybe you remembered it wrong,” “Maybe you broke some rule,” “Maybe you violated the TOS … somehow,” “Maybe he had a good reason,” “Maybe you this and maybe you that.” All stated without evidence. And yet always slanted to give the aggressor the benefit of the doubt.
• Scare Quotes and other Expressions of Doubt: putting “depressed” in scare quotes. Also “victim”, “evil”, “abusive”, … , always in quotes or, if spoken out loud, accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.
  Adding a mocking voice tone of skepticism that expresses doubt that the “so-called victim” is really a victim. It’s like they’re saying “Oh, you think you’re a victim? No no — I’m going to take that away from you too. Even that.”

Words used by Persons with Empathy Deficiency and Empathy Disorders:

• “victim mentality”
• “drama” (the catch-all term for “other people’s problems, which are not important to me”)

Identification with the Aggressor: Angelizing the Offender in every way possible:

• Claiming to have supernatural access to the offender’s thoughts. Example: Claiming to know that the offense was unintentional: “I’m sure she didn’t mean to do that.”

• “If you look at the relationships that haven’t worked out, the only common denominator (that I’m smart enough to see) is you!”
• “No, he didn’t hurt your feelings. That’s not how it works — people get upset because they choose to.”

• The nursery-rhyme belief that all people are good and will return civility for civility.
• Magical beliefs more appropriate for a four-year-old than an adult: “👶🏻 If you’ll just ignore them, they’ll stop bothering you!”
• Adolescent Pabulums: “Life is too short to have a negative attitude.” “*I* believe in not carrying a chip on my shoulder.”
• “I choose to forgive!” (Comebacks: “THAT is a pro-crime attitude.” “I expect to hear a child talk that way, but in an adult, it’s just sad.”)

Adolescent Troll Keywords:

Internet Troll Behavior (Verbal Bullying):

• Techniques for silencing victims by shouting them down: Loudness, profanity, verbal abuse, exclamation points!!, ALL CAPS, boldface.
• Pretense that the solution to your problem is easy, thus implying that you’re really stupid for not thinking of it, while trivializing the work involved. “Well, have you tried doing ____?!?”
• Displays instant overt disrespect for the victim’s emotions and boundaries (while expressing instant respect for the offender).
• Profanity: Four-letter words, used by the troll to express a lack of regard for the victim and lack of fear of the victim and utter contempt for the victim’s boundaries.
• Borderline profanity: Soft-profanity terms which are back-formed from swear words and gutter language, intended to indicate loudness and meant to express annoyance and a threat of “If I were there in person, I’d physically assault you because you disgust me”:
  • Hints of sexual violence:
    • freaking, effing, fracking (and all other variants of “fucking”)
    • your attitude sucks
    • suck it up
  • Unmentionable body parts: “Get off your ass,” “kick in the butt”, “Grow a pair”, “Don’t be a wussy”
  • Bathroom functions: “crap”, “bullshit”, “pisses me off”
    → It’s curious that most web forum moderators draw the line at actual profanity but ignore these bullying methods, these blatant attempts to scare and dominate.
  
  The reader will note that this list does not include second-level soft profanity terms like “darn” and “fiddlesticks”, all the weak and old-timey words which have gone out of fashion in web forums. Trolls don’t use these words because these words don’t express enough credible threat. No one’s afraid of you when you say “Gosh” and “Dad burn it” and “Jiminy Cricket! Cheese and Rice! Judas Priest!” Real profanity, like shouting, is intended as a method to incite fear. It’s all about Alpha signaling.

Viral Abuse Memes: Smacks and slaps and slurs, used by abusive parents, who taught them to their children, who will now try to use them on you. Teenage trolls in web forums sometimes attack victims with these shut-up messages and silencing tactics. Your normal wish not to be mistreated will be denounced as:

• “a pity party”
• “self-pity”
• “Aw, poor poor you!”
• “feeling sorry for yourself”
• “pouting”
• “wallowing”
• “throwing a tantrum”, “pitching a hissy fit”
• “ranting”
• “stamping your feet”
• “trying to get attention”
• “demanding to be coddled”
• “taking things too seriously”

• “get a life”
• “stop whining about it”
• “get out of the house more”
• “Don’t insult the people who answered your question” — even though they insulted you first (Translation: “You aren’t an Alpha, so you aren’t allowed to respond in kind or defend yourself.”)

• “I was just being honest.”
• “I was just showing you tough love.”
• “I guess the truth hurts!”
• “This is a public forum, I’ll respond however I like (because the rules only apply to you, not to me).”
• “A real friend tells it like it is.”
• “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Projection Terms which actually describe bullies better than victims: hypersensitive; overreactive; playing the victim; ranting; self-absorbed; self-centered; self-involved; trying to get attention.

… and all the other Words used by Abusers and their defenders: crybaby; faking; self-pity; whiner, whining.

Not only will they kick you when you’re down, but they’ll kick you because you’re down, because you’re not stoic enough for their tastes.
They’ll pick your worst moment to start lecturing you on how you should be more in charge of your emotions.

• “I mean this in the nicest possible way,” followed by (of course) insults.

Standing up for yourself is supposedly somehow a sign of weakness. Defending yourself is now branded “being defensive”, which is Very Very Bad, according to 1990s pop-psychology. It’s pro-abuser propaganda, designed to render victims even more powerless by persuading them that Resistance Is Futile or somehow Wrong.

Religion encourages the victim to believe he must unilaterally forgive his abusers, even though his abusers aren’t forgiving him for being the way he is. …

Invalidation of victim by therapist: Your legitimate expectation not to be abused is labeled an infantile “need for approval.”

They’re actually proud of their inexperience: They bombard you with their magical belief that all families are normal and loving and trustworthy and honorable, just because THEIR families were.

• Doesn’t recognize abuse as abuse. Instead of saying “That’s an abusive situation and you need to leave it,” tells you you just need to try harder, be more flexible, interpret things differently, give abusers the benefit of the doubt (unilaterally), not notice mistreatment, etc., etc.

Stoic mind games designed to program you not to react to abuse and insults:

• “You can’t control other people, only your own mind, only your own reactions.”
• “You are in control of who you let ruin your day.”
• “Other people can’t hurt you without your permission,” etc.

• “I was just being honest.”
• “I was just giving feedback.”
• “I believe in telling it like it is.”
• “You’re so defensive.”
• “Apparently you can’t handle constructive criticism.”
• “I gave you the honest truth without coddling you and you can’t handle it. You’re obviously just fishing for sympathy and not good advice.”
• “I’d rather be truthful than popular.”
• “Get off your ass. Good luck with your pity party.”
• “Stop whining and complaining.”
• “Quit crying and being a baby.”

Dangerous Personalities: Beware of forum-dwelling abusers who say:

• “I don’t think what we’re saying is harsh, I think it’s constructive criticism™!”
• “I don’t think any of the replies to your question were mean or judgmental!”
• “I *like* coming here to get my butt kicked, and you should too!”

Miscellaneous:

Beware of hardened abusers who actually brag that they can’t see the problem:

• Angelizing of the aggressor: The interloper says the underling victim must have done something to offend his big powerful opponent, because surely power would never misbehave! 🙄 Anyone who believes that either flunked history… or is white. Uneducated people are super-ignorant about how little effort it takes to “offend” the powerful.
• Automatically defends other abusers when told of their behavior.

Clueless comebacks from sociopaths: Often with scare quotes to express mocking sarcasm:

• “I must have ‘hit a nerve’ 🙄 ”
• “Guess I said something ‘rude’ or ‘abusive’ or ‘insensitive’ yet again 🙄 ”

• Unilateral sarcasm becomes a feature of the relationship, and may intensify when the non-sarcastic partner objects.

Statements that the victim of the harassment and abuse should be the one responsible for changing:

• “Well, if you don’t like him bothering you, you should dress differently / walk to school a different way / not go to that place!” But the abuser is not given any such recommendations. The abuser is not told to do anything differently.

Upon learning that you’ve been mistreated or suffered a misfortune, the fake friend undergoes a change of personality:

• All inhibitions go away. Ridiculous advice is given.
• Begins probing your boundaries to find out how much sarcasm and criticism they can get away with.
• Starts claiming to be “just joking” or “just kidding” all the time.

Signs & Symptoms.

When someone attacks or mistreats you, your friends may see that as an occasion to join the attack, using any of these methods:

• Accusations without evidence. All you have to do is mention that you were in a disagreement with someone, and the listener automatically sides with whomever wronged you. There is no thought involved, there is no cautious time delay, there is no fact checking, just an instant assumption that you must have done something wrong — because anyone who mistreats you is assumed to have the power to do so, and power gets automatic respect.
• Blames the victim. Bullies always think the victim is the one responsible. This is where abusers get the belief that crying is a major offense. This is where bullies get the belief that the victim’s reaction is the problem, which justifies more bullying.
• Whipping Boy Justice: After any disagreement, bystanders lecture the victim for the way he reacted; but the big scary aggressor is given no such lecture.
• Expressing Selective Cynicism and Selective Skepticism against victims and underlings and smaller, weaker opponents; expressing Automatic Respect and Selective Gullibility in favor of the rude, the violent, and the powerful.
• Lecturing the Victim: The attitude that victims don’t really have it so bad and it’s the bystander’s job to give them a dose of “perspective”.
• Selective assistance, helping the abuser but not the victim: The defender begins to speak for the abuser, even making the abuser’s threats for him; for example: “Don’t correct him — you might make him mad.” The fact that the abuser has already made the victim mad is left out, as if the victim’s emotions were unimportant.
• Repeats the attacker’s scare tactics and propaganda, to manipulate you out of defending yourself: sometimes heard in international relations as “If you strike back, your enemy might recruit more terrorists.” — overheard from some pundit on the news in 2023.
• Delusions of Wisdom: Your “friend” suddenly thinks everything he says is golden. He suddenly fancies himself a therapist, sage, or philosopher, and begins spewing starry-eyed New Age advice: that you should view your misfortunes as positives, and your losses as wins, your enemies as friends, and view their attacks on you as doing you a favor.
• Delusions that one is being attacked by the mere sadness of the other party. As though the other person’s sadness is somehow offensive and invites attack.
• Loss of tact.
• Grinning sarcasm.
• Behaving as though this is the time for insults, followed by “The truth hurts, doesn’t it?”
• Dominance behaviors. … Beware of people who view your time of sadness as their opportunity to dictate your schedule.
• Flashes of Snottiness: Such as telling a person who is sobbing, “If you won’t answer me, I can’t help you.”
• Tears of frustration and helplessness are ridiculed and mocked.
• Personality Changes: The friend who suddenly feels free to criticize you.
• When confronted, pretends not to see why the above are problems. Pretends not to see why second-class-citizen treatment shouldn’t be good enough for you.
• People who quit working for an abusive employer are accused of being “lazy”, no matter how many jobs they apply for. And if the victims dare to show sadness during this time, further charges will be added to the laundry list of insults: the amount of nit-picking just skyrockets.

Attitudes and Character Flaws:

• Suddenly becomes empathy-challenged.
• Rates all your troubles for entertainment value: “Bor-ing!” “Lighten up!” “Cheer up!”
• They talk down to you, and you can just tell that their parents talked to them this same way — and now their children are trying to infect you with the same contagious abuse.

Abuser-Defender Personality Disorder (ADPD):

Someone with this disorder:

• Instantly defends anyone who attacks you:
  • “Maybe you misunderstood his intentions.”
• Pretends not to see the abuse or mistreatment:
  • “I don’t see the problem with this so-called ‘abuse’ you’re talking about.”
  • “Surely that’s not the problem. If you won’t tell me what he did that was so terrible, I can’t help you.”
• Advises you to stay with an abusive partner, spouse, or boss.
• Says you shouldn’t blame your abuser. Says “Blaming brings you down to their level.” That’s like saying that building a hospital brings you down to the level of whatever disease you’re fighting — just what I’d expect to hear from someone who secretly likes germs or dislikes doctors, or who for whatever reason sees things from the abuser’s point of view.
• However, this doesn’t mean that the defender doesn’t understand politeness, as shown by the fact that he or she won’t allow anything unkind to be said against abusers. The defender will often say it’s ok to correct victims, but not perpetrators. (Double Standard)
  Won’t allow you to say anything unkind about your abuser — but thinks it’s ok for your abuser to criticize you.
• Selectively uses religious quotations to push an ideology in which forgiveness is emphasized but apologizing is never mentioned. (Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace” concept)
• Refers to verbal abuse as “free speech”.

More symptoms:

• Double Standard: Urges tolerance of aggressor behaviors; but tolerance of the victim’s rights is never mentioned as important.
• Advises the target to be tolerant toward the bully. But does not advise the bully to be tolerant at all, because advising a powerful person would supposedly be “rude”.
• Selectively helps your abuser by thinking up his rationalizations for him. But doesn’t offer you the same kind of help.
  Examples: “Maybe he had a bad day! / a bad life! / a bad childhood!”
• Upon seeing you attacked or sad: The instant assumption that you don’t have boundaries.
• The assumption that the rule of tact has been suspended: accusations and even speculation are spoken out loud and without hesitation.
• Kitchen Sinking: All your past behavior (behavior having nothing to do with the present situation) is dug up as evidence that you once did something wrong, and therefore you deserve infinite retaliation.

Excerpts from my book (in progress)

Quotes

Further Reading at Other Sites

More proof of Feeding Frenzy:

• “Rape Victim, 14, Dies After Public Flogging in Bangladesh” (at AOL News)
• Starfish site: Another example of victimhood attracting attack: a WWII defense tactic of building a decoy burning city to attract fire from enemy bombers. It worked! The bomber crews said “Aha, there’s a big fire. Someone else must have bombed it, so that must be the right place to bomb.” (at Wikipedia)
• “My bf told me he got off to the thought of my sexual abuse” (at Reddit)
  → What’s great about this Reddit example is it contains TWO kinds of Feeding Frenzy: (1) the boyfriend who gets aroused by her prior victimhood at the hands of someone else — that’s the usual kind of FF; and (2) being ganged up on by dozens of people all shouting the same demand (“Leave him right now!”) is another kind of Feeding Frenzy: a power fantasy triggered by someone else’s victimhood, where bystanders all get the same idea: “This person is a safe target for me to give orders to.” 🙄
• Even therapists will take the side of the abuser. See “A Narcissist by Any Other Name” (at Psychology Today)
• Liberty University fined for sexual assault mishandling (including: punishing the victims) (at The Damage Report) (video, 5.5 minutes)
• Hybristophilia (at Wikipedia)
• Some men report that when they open up and discuss their baggage and display sadness, their wives call them gay and lose feelings for them. See LovelyRita999‘s long list of Feeding Frenzy behaviors at foot of thread. I can’t find the earlier thread she’s quoting from, but to be fair, Reddit’s search engine is horribly broken as of August 2025 and can’t find existing pages. (at Reddit)
• A Stunning Example: A wannabe advice columnist gave in to the Feeding Frenzy impulse and bullied someone who wrote to her for helpful advice. The columnist quickly informed her customer that she’s annoying and dramatic and has a tendency to exaggerate. Unbelievably rude and offensive, and dangerous to the self-esteem of the people she purports to help. Certainly not up to The Guardian’s usual standard of quality and professionalism. See article (at The Guardian).
  → It’s not the only time this columnist has been called out: See this writeup (at The Campaign for Survivor Family Justice).
  → Or how about this post, in which the same columnist states that “Get over it” applies only to the victim? Also making an appearance: the trite familiar victim-blaming tropes that You Can’t Change Others (i.e. changing is your job) and “don’t allow him to impinge on you” (i.e. “just don’t listen”). Yawn! (at The Guardian)

more Thoughts of the Week

More at This Site

• Definition of Verbal Abuse

• Is there a booklet of manners in your house?
  We offer this one:
  How Rude! — a booklet about rude and abusive people, and how to recognize them