Eye Wide Open: "Better the Devil You Know"

The Boil-Down: For readers who have perused this blog to any extent, they have likely observed that an "eyes wide open" stance means that,  for any human being trying to recover from trauma and grow into wellness, unfortunate patterns in the human universe swim perpetually more into focus. It's a bit like coming into educated awareness of all the tiny organisms living in your food and on your kitchen countertops: ills lurk at every turn. (If you're wondering, this author does not advocate living life driven by clean-freak anxiety about food prep surfaces, and urges readers to pay more attention to the properties food holds too much of and the nutrients it lacks than whether there are spider eggs in the wild rice.) This article is written to remind you that the bad news is also where the good news begins.

The Details: The titular adage above is originally credited to R. Taverner (1539): in Latin, nota res mala, opima. It translates literally to "an evil thing known is best." If toxic forces are around, it's better to be aware of them than to be ignorant of them; that is the stance taken throughout this blog. In previous entries to Eyes Wide Open, I introduce concepts like narcissistic gravity, triangulation and groupthink, describing how these forces produce a breeding ground for denial, justification, victim-blaming, punishment of non-conformity, and substance abuse subculture. All of these contribute to the corruption of institutions (psychiatry, the family, the church, the government--any social institution is susceptible), which paves the way for domestic violence, incest, rape, persecution of health clinicians by insurance companies, misappropriation of tax money, iatrogenesis (when oath-sworn professionals harm those they have promised to help), systemic racism, and even genocide. There are a plethora of germs in the air and water. These toxic forces and their outcomes derive from psychological trauma, and they perpetuate trauma, repeating harmful cycles over and over until something requires the cycles to stop. The counterforces capable of halting harmful biopsychosocial patterns include family emancipation, sociopolitical revolution, and international war. Or for a single individual human, it may "only" require the process of healing from past trauma and purposing to live "off the triangle."

As unpleasant as it is to find out everything you could potentially breathe or drink in, knowledge is power. One can discern the toxic from the benign, discover which causes can be remedied, and live outside the influence of those that can't. If a person can't gain weight and has tried solving the problem in other ways, and then someone with experience or expertise points out signs the person may have a tapeworm, it makes good albeit unpleasant sense to seriously consider the possibility that parasitic infection could be the cause of the weight loss. Instead of ignoring signs that our social network, our intimate space, or our own behavior may have highly toxic components to it, we have the option of taking difficult but healthy steps into self-care.

Once we come into lucid awareness that our own well-being is out of balance due to posttraumatic symptoms, intimate toxicity, or narcissistic gravity in our social group(s), we can then identify what about the situation we control. We can change our own behavior habits, drinking less, ceasing gossip, stopping contemptuous thoughts, or no longer eating a thousand calories after 11pm. We can practice bringing ourselves back into balance by lowering our SUDs score to zero, making sure our self-acceptance is regularly full (a score of seven out of seven). We can seek competent expert help to recover from flagrant or subtle traumatic events, eliminating nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, or bouts of suicidal intent. We can approach intimates to make amends for the harm we've done to them and ask how we can improve our participation in space. We can kindly but insistently request that our intimates show up in space with us only with empathy, not with contempt. When it's counterproductive or even unsafe to attempt to communicate the need for changes, we can draw boundaries--even when it seems impossible to do so, we can believe there is a way, seek a solutional method and use it to change boundaries for the long-term, then grieving what we have lost in that process.

The same concepts and tools Eyes Wide Open offers to understand and change our own emotional health and improve our relationship spaces can be applied to societal problems. However...when it comes to society-wide emotional poison and violently harmful institutional corruption, activism can come at a greater cost than we might be ready to realize. Coordinated awareness, the voice of collective protest, and the power of the vote can produce institutional change; however, there is evidence of forces at work in and around society's institutions which are proving far more powerful and elusive than our political and legal systems are prepared to take on. The organized sociopathy which leads to destructive fascism, plutocracy, kleptocracy, and widespread human rights violations such as systemic racism, war, grand-scale financial scams, human trafficking, and genocide--such sociopathy in modern society is by its very nature difficult to detect unless you are one of its immediate victims. Its strength in numbers, its infiltration of the halls of power, and its ability to hide in plain sight all make a sociopathic groupthink difficult to oppose. The more-than-willing ability for well-organized groups of powerful, empathy-free men to punish non-conformity by disabling or crushing the opposition makes them seemingly impossible to extinguish.

One common method involves fleecing the public by distributing propaganda which conditions Americans to dismiss sociopathic phenomena as fake news, the stuff of conspiracy theories (and they themselves may have actually introduced false phenomena such as Pizzagate/QAnon to make the public less likely to believe in their misbehavior).  When base level attempts to discredit those willing to report is not enough, ruining the careers of or murdering whistle-blowers (often with full impunity awarded to those ordering and committing the acts) silences all opposition. Moving forward, in addition to a deeper look into self-wellness and other subjects in future blog articles, Eyes Wide Open will further address human rights violations being carried out by socially accepted yet sociopathic men who are hiding in plain sight.