Blog Summary: A Comprehensive Review of Eyes Wide Open Concepts and Topics

The Boil-Down:  To date, Eyes Wide Open has published thirteen prior blog entries focused on helping readers optimize their skilled abilities to rise above literary bias and think as freely and effectively for themselves as possible. As a result of this process of gaining systemic clarity, we can gain increased awareness of unhealthy forces working against us in the human universe.  The following is a comprehensive summary of concepts designed to aid in your acquisition of that increased awareness.

The Details:  This blog launched with the concept of narcissistic gravity, a term which does not seem to appear verbatim anywhere else on the internet. A search of this term pulls up this blog, followed by a majority of links leading to language which places the crosshairs of its description directly on the human person. What I mean is, most of these articles want to label people narcissists rather than separating humans from their attitudes or displays of narcissism. One article high in the search results even attempts to equate positive self-esteem with "healthy narcissism."  I would prefer to think of healthy narcissism as occurring naturally in human circumstances and dynamics without reaching toxic levels of effect in social space (for instance, when an angry spouse instinctively cries "what about ME?" when their partner is trying to voice a complaint during mutual emotional conflict, or when a person caught in a life-threatening emergency ignores the safety of others because there is only time to save themselves from certain death). That aside, narcissistic gravity is a term intended to draw attention to the dynamic effects of narcissism. Self-centered tendencies coming from an individual or group with whom we share space will pull on us. We will feel it, we will react to a palpable pressure to give in to it, and it can become exhausting. If we let it, narcissistic gravity will suck the life out of us, leave us bankrupt of energy and freedom and burdened with victimization and shame.

A natural dynamic result of narcissistic gravity is the PVR triangle, a diagrammed depiction of the person wielding the power of narcissistic gravity (at least in the experience of the diagrammer)--the perp--at the uppermost vertex, the victim of the gravity at the lowest vertex, and the would-be (often absent or failed) rescuer ensconced in some middle ground at the third corner. The PVR triangle as applied in trauma theory is a likely adaptation of the 1968 Karpman Drama Triangle, whose title and historic use appear to be applied to the much lighter applications of destructive miscommunication in human conflict (Stephen Karpman's website home page cites "games" and "drama" in human interaction without reference to trauma, especially in its more severe forms). The human energy represented by the PVR Triangle is the narcissistic gravity machine responsible for harmful stress, particularly traumatic stress.

The concept of trauma  is the result of one or more stressful events which can cataclysmically rewire the human brain, rendering it unable to stop functioning as though danger and harm were still imminent, and rendering the human unable grieve and reverse the emergency state of mind. Attachment trauma occurs in childhood and youth in intimate space with caregivers or other figures more powerful than we, attachment figures who harm us through acts of commission or omission.  Attachment trauma that happens in adulthood is actually re-trauma.  Events that give the trauma survivor re-experiences of danger in circumstances which are not actually dangerous qualify as trigger events, which are different from retraumatizing events, but are often mislabeled as "re-traumatic" in online articles and even therapy sessions. The recovery process following attachment trauma can be characterized as attachment grief.

Grief avoidance is a natural early or unrefined posttraumatic reaction designed to protect the ego (a person's inner self). A significant plurality of all humans live in such avoidance of grief, because grief is very uncomfortable and requires strengthening of the ego. Denial, or the "not me" stance, is one such mechanism for avoiding grief. Denial is one of many grief-avoidant escapes, which can be characterized as forms of  reenactment or undoing, or both. In fact, it might be difficult to identify a reenactment that does not also function as a traumatic undoing. A sex abuse survivor who mutilates their own genitals in the way that their perp mutilated the victim's genitals is reenacting the sexual abuse, but is also undoing the sexual abuse because now they (the victim) are in control of the mutilation, not the perp. Denial is an example of undoing which will inevitably lead to a failure to self-protect. Another example of undoing is when adults in a family forbid anyone to speak the name of a family perp or a victim who died. Alcohol and substance abuse are common grief-avoidant escapes which reenact and undo trauma, as well as creating narcissistic gravity, reinforcing shame, and invariably traumatizing (child) or retraumatizing (adult) humans within the gravitational pull.

Eyes Wide Open tried its hand at comparing the concepts of groupthink and deviant subculture, or perhaps more accurately, describing the way the former manifests within the latter.  Some authors have suggested that groupthink consistently leads to failed group goals because of obstacles to dissent or outside opinions. However, the author of this blog insists that within deviant subculture, groupthink is an intentional reason for the existence of the group, to the benefit of the leader(s) of the group while they are busy generating narcissistic gravity for their own gain, at the expense of other group members and outsiders who are victims of the group. Often, characteristics of deviant subculture occur in mainstream society, in plain sight. The unethical and illegal activities of corporations such as Centene exemplify the results of deviant groupthink in mainstream society.

The boy code is Eyes Wide Open's way of referring to the trauma of premature separation, and/or gender straitjacketing.  Boys by and large are not socialized any differently than they were fifty years ago. At a young age, they are denied gentle nurturance offered to girls, and pressured to refrain from feeling, expressing themselves, or asking for support in ways that might make them look "weak." Many such boys grow up out of touch with how they feel or how they make others feel. It is common for them to pass such trauma (subtle or overt) on to their children, and such men are at increased risk for their lack of empathy to result in commissive harm such as sexual harassment, rape, and acts of domestic violence. One other specific form of child maltreatment is allowing one's child false empowerment--license to mistreat others without receiving adequate (or any) corrective feedback or consequences. This is often accompanied by parents' failure to model empathy and acts of altruism toward others while insisting the child practice the same. False empowerment leads to contemptuous, empathy-free conduct in adulthood; males and females alike are capable of living in such harmful ways to those around them.

Eyes Wide Open next took on the unwieldy subject of wellness, comparing the term with the related concept of well-being.  The immediate observation was how adulterated the concept has been by capitalistic propaganda. The term had been twisted to pander to people's hopes and fears related to beauty and happiness, ostensibly achieved by material gain or spending. One definition, the ability and energy to do what one wants, left this author querulous; it seemed myopic in the direction of physical health and therefore reductionistic. My article went on to articulate the importance of subjectively experiencing well-being under the umbrella of objective wellness--or often in spite of a deficit of wellness. The hypothesis goes like this: long after traumatic events, the human traumatized state (which is marked by a measurable physiological unwellness in the brain) presents myriad obstacles to well-being. The ACE Questionnaire and its related research support this idea; adverse childhood experiences increase the likelihood that victims' will die by at least five of the ten leading causes of death. The solution is recovery, a series of interventions that rewire the brain via exercises in the mind. Recovery from trauma prevents your ACE score from determining the outcome of your life. In the process of trauma recovery, survivors learn how to put themselves in a measurably calm and balanced state free of negative judgment (especially negative self-judgment). That, according to Eyes Wide Open, is the operational definition of well-being: zero out of ten on the Subjective Units of Distress (SUDs) scale, and seven out of seven on the self-validity scale. The definition of psychological wellness is the survivor's ability to bring themselves into that kind of balance at will--it's fully possibly any time we are not in immediate danger and don't have an agonizing injury or pain condition. The author asserts that people who practice the habit of bringing themselves into balance of this kind of well-being will no longer experience themselves as living their "mental illness."

In the article about sexual violence, we asserted that the phenomenon is more prevalent than research suggests, as well as the need to remove obstacles to talking about it. The author cites a definition of seven types of sexual violence referred to as the "sexual violence umbrella," identifies the triangulated harm done by professionals who are in a position to help (known as iatrogenesis), and commits the remainder of the article to the term rape, which is an inevitable, devastating goal of all sexual violence when it progresses as intended by perpetrators of sexual violence. A central conclusion of the sexual violence article was this: because of the nature of the PVR triangle, rape culture is a concomitant of alcoholic subculture and the culture of war. It's like discovering a fatty liver in the context of morbid obesity. Another central conclusion: any unabated institutional power (or unabated individual power wielded with contempt or without empathy) inevitably leads to rape.

The final Eyes Wide Open entry prior to this summary in review offered a Provider Focus on the wiles of contracting with insurance carriers and third party payers, which puts health professionals at industry-normative risk of the abuse of power by insurance companies, managed care organizations and their payer-arm corporations...which ultimately can result in providers having thousands of dollars legally stolen from them when they have done nothing illegal or unethical themselves.

Please feel encouraged to visit any of these blog entries for detailed reading, including the article on Costa Rica. Each focused article ends with a section called What You Can Do. My hope is to help you manage your own emotional risk and enhance your journey of healing, recovery and well-being. Toward the proliferation of that goal to all areas of your life, check out future articles on topics such as relationships, psychiatry, sex trafficking, and government.